Patience, We Must Re-Learn Patience!

February 27, 2025

By Ray DeGraw

Remember the phrase, "please allow five-to-six weeks for delivery? Remember coming home from school every day and asking your mother if your package had arrived yet? Your poor mom forced to break the bad news to you every afternoon that the mailman had failed once again. On the weekends you watched him slowly walking up the road; stopping at every damned house to talk to the homeowner...only to fill the box with endless parades of coupon books, bills and magazines. Bastard!

After time, you just stopped watching. It would take so damned long to get your order that you often forgot you purchased it in the first place. Then, out of nowhere, it was just there! That glorious day when it magically appeared and your long journey had finally come to fruition. Unfortunately, more times than not, it was usually anticlimactic. There it was, sitting on the table next to the front door, a small parcel with a box so beaten up it looked like it came through East Beirut. "Gee, it looked so much bigger in the catalog!"

Sometimes it took so frigging long to arrive (as 5-to-6 weeks sometimes meant 5-to-6 months), you had outgrown the toy you had spent countless hours dreaming about. Your poor mother, who had endured weeks and weeks of you pestering her like she had some kind of psychic connection to it and could give you updates to its whereabouts, is astounded that you are less than enthused about its miraculous appearance. "Aren't you going to play with your new toy? You waited weeks for it!" Meh.

My children now order things online and pace around the house the same way. They check the updates every hour like some magical porthole or wormhole has opened up and the truck has arrived in front of the house. As the old man on the porch yelling at kids to "stay off my lawn", I remind them of the pain and suffering we had to endure during our childhood waiting eons for our prize; not just one day. They laugh and make fun of me and tell me, "that's because dinosaurs delivered the mail when you were little." Little bastards!

Of course, who am I to scoff at their impatience? I just spent my entire morning looking out the window for the FedEx truck to deliver something I ordered THREE DAYS AGO! THREE DAYS! What the fuck is this, the stone ages?! Where the hell is my god damned package?! Fuckers! Wait, is that what I think it is? It's the truck! Shit, it just drove by the house! The tracker said it was on today's truck...where are you going?! Bastards!