Shell Shocked: Long lines and sanity
I have a friend who has an unusual fetish. He loves long lines.
He will try to find any long line he can so long as there are more than 20 people on it. He simply loves periodic elections because there are always long lines where he lives to get to the voting booths. He adores hit movies and makes sure he’s almost last in line to get in to see them.
He literally gloats when he needs to renew his driver’s license. He realizes he can now do it online but prefers to get on one of those typical long lines at the Motor Vehicle Bureau.
And, of course, he prefers to dine at Sanibel restaurants that are first-come first-serve. The longer it takes before he hears “your table is ready” the happier he is. But above all, he embraces Sanibel traffic during the peak winter months so that he’s on a long, slow line of traffic heading to the causeway.
I know of no one else who enjoys being in long lines. Personally, if I see three people in front of me on line at Bailey’s I abandon my shopping cart and forgive me bail out. I am the total opposite of my friend. I hate lines. I’m too impatient, intolerant and line-ophobic. If my turn doesn’t come up quickly I turn into a mass of jelly Smucker’s being the preference.
I will not stand in line for a movie, a voting booth, a restaurant, an emergency room, a justice of the peace, a flu shot or a toll booth. I asked my friend how he got to be the complete opposite of me in this regard. How could two people be such polar opposites? It severely restricts the activities we can do together.
We can’t even play golf together because I won’t wait in line for tee time. He prefers being the last of 20 golf carts in front of him. We can’t dine together because he prefers busy restaurants that don’t take reservations. If I show up at restaurants that take reservations I will walk out if there is even a five-minute wait.
We often have deep conversations about our essential differences. I asked him how he can tolerate long lines and waiting time. He said that he was brought up on a prairie and hardly saw other people when he was growing up.
I told him that I was born and raised in New York and had my fill with crowds, noise and the feeling of being smothered. He said that he now loves people, lots of them and being on long lines satisfies his feelings of loneliness and despair.
I told him that solitude is a good thing and that the fewer the people around me the happier I am. He told me that I’m loony. I told him that he’s a moron. And thus our intellectual discussion continued.
Of course, neither of us can convince the other of the merits of our point of view. We’ve learned to live with these essential differences in our outlook on life. But we do accommodate each other at times.
We’re both on the look out for fast food restaurants that have very little traffic in them at certain hours of the day. So we wind up having lunch at 3 p.m. when the restaurants are empty. He convulses because there aren’t any lines of people waiting for a table at these off-hour interludes but he does it for our friendship.
And I, in turn, make some sacrifices for him to keep our friendship going. I will sit in his car during peak traffic times on Periwinkle getting off the island and wait on line with him to see a hit movie in Fort Myers. One day I ran out of tranquilizer pills and had to be forcibly restrained to remain on the line. But, after all, what are friends for?
-Art Stevens is a long-time columnist for The Islander. His tongue-in-cheek humor is always offered with a smile.