Hurry up and wait!
That’s what it feels like as I sit here patiently waiting for my turn to get the much anticipated COVID-19 vaccine.
Alas, as a younger Zoomer, I am too old for one and too young for the other.
Kind of like being caught in a time warp. But I can be patient as I don’t mind waiting.
It’s not as if I have anything else to do.
Drink more alcohol. Check.
Eat more carbohydrates. Check.
Read a good book. Check.
Watch something on Netflix. Check.
So, you see, I have lots of time to while away.
In fact, humans spend much of their life waiting.
According to Mr. Google, the average person, throughout their lifetime, spends five years waiting in lines where roughly six months of that is waiting at traffic lights.
In an American article in Yahoo Life, an AAA report states the average American spends 17,600 minutes driving each year. That’s 3,520 minutes or 58.6 hours, spent waiting at red lights every 365 days.
Thanks to the pandemic, as we are spending more time working from home or just simply staying home, we are spending less time of our precious lives waiting at red lights.
Such good news.
According to a Daily Mail survey in England, we spend nearly 20 months waiting for partners and children.
We apparently spend around 17 months of our life waiting for food to be cooked.
In fact, if you add slow technology, waiting in queues (Brits are so polite) and waiting for the kettle to boil (the British do drink a lot of tea), they estimate Britons spend almost seven years waiting around or about 11 per cent of their whole life.
So as I await my turn to roll up my sleeve, I have had ample time to contemplate what waiting means to me.
Sometimes I feel like one of the two characters in Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot, who engage in a variety of discussions and encounters while awaiting Godot, who never arrives.
And waiting brings back countless memories of my favourite songs including Waiting on a Friend by the Rolling Stones and Waiting for the Miracle by Leonard Cohen.
And who could forget the decade when I had big hair and padded shoulder pads with Foreigner’s Waiting for a Girl Like You dominating the airwaves.
A little more recently we had Waiting on the World to Change by John Mayer and Waitin’on a Woman by Brad Paisley.
So I am not alone in biding my time.
A memory which pops into my head dates back to the ’80s when I was waiting for my second daughter to be born. She was overdue by two weeks.
It was late June and hot outside. I sat on a lawn chair by our pool in our townhouse complex every day for two weeks. I wore a dusty rose pink Laura Ashley dress my mother-in-law made for me and announced to whoever would listen that I would sport the same outfit every day until my unborn child decided to make an appearance.
As I looked like a beached whale and may have been a little testy then, I defied anyone to say so much as a peep about my maternal omnipresence.
I think I burned that dress once my beautiful baby was born, but she was worth the wait.
So, you see, I have no problem in waiting for my first vaccine.
I’ll just loosen the button on my jeans and pop another bonbon into my mouth.
Put my feet up and chill.
Hurry up and wait.
April Lewis is the local communications director for CARP, a national group committed to a ‘New Vision of Aging for Canada.’ She writes monthly.