Bearing an Hourglass (50 page)

I had one other interruption during this effort. My wife and I had to go for our six-month dental hygiene appointments. We take care of ourselves; I do eat carefully, exercise
seriously, and keep up with the doctor, dentist, and oculist. But these things, too, take time, and it comes out of my working day. In this instance I took along a book to read and pencil and paper, so as to be able to use any slack time available. Sure enough, the hygienist was running half an hour late, so I read a little of Asimov’s
Foundation’s Edge
, then used it as backing for my penciled notes. I noticed that others in the waiting room simply sat, some not even reading, merely waiting, as it were, in stasis. It is evident that others don’t take time as seriously as I do; it doesn’t really bother them to waste it. I am keenly aware that my duration in life is limited; am I unique in this? Even when I’m not writing, I am driven to make my time count. Call me a workaholic if you will, but to me, the indifference to the passage of time that most people evince seems like folly. To me, a life that is slack is a life being lived inefficiently. I don’t like inefficiency.

I looked around the waiting room, listening to the interminable, innocuous sound piped in to soothe the animals. I noted the pictures on the walls and the Bibles placed there by the Gideons, right under the Winnie-the-Pooh cartoon mural. I am agnostic, not espousing any religion or pretending to know the actual will of God, but certainly there is much of value in the Bible, and I would read it rather than sit like a zombie doing nothing. I would read the Koran, too, or the
Bhagavad Gita
, or
Tao Te Ching
, the Chinese Way of Life. It is no bad thing to heed the significant thought of other ages and cultures, and to profit from their lessons. But no one was reading any of these here.

In my Note for
On a Pale Horse
, I concluded that we should live our lives in such a manner that we would not at the end be ashamed. Accepting this, should we not also live our lives as efficiently as we can? Life is the greatest gift we know; what point is there in wasting any part of it? If we should not measure out our lives with coffee spoons, as in T. S. Eliot’s
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
—when I was in the Army, we spoke of “Private
Prufrock”—we should also not similarly tune out in the lacunae of waiting rooms. This is our life; they are not making any more of it. And with this thought, written in a waiting room, I conclude.