I Didn't Do It First Thing

 At 6:15 this evening, I washed the car.

I had my shift at the museum this morning and then, as usual, came home, had lunch, and took a nap.  I never used to be much of a nap taker, but I have to admit that the museum work in this heat gets me knackered.

I hadn't washed the car in a couple of months because it was raining every single blessed day so why bother.  But it hasn't rained for about a week and the car was looking a bit grungy.

It wasn't the fact that I washed it that's noteworthy.  It was the time.

For 48 years we did stuff on Bob time, which, more precisely, was Bob's Mother's Time.  She had this thing about if something had to be done, it had to be done First Thing In The Morning.  At at absolute crunch, it could be finished up Right After Lunch.

But you never started anything in the afternoon.  That would be "too late."

And that got ingrained into Bob, and therefore into me.  Although from time to time I would question it.  I remember one afternoon, when we were talking about some sort of house project we would be doing the next day, and he said that we should roll out of bed and get going in the morning, rather than dawdling over breakfast, because we had to get to Lowe's for supplies and then get to work.

We  were having this discussion about 3 o'clock in the afternoon.  I made the obvious suggestion:  "Why don't we go to Lowe's now and get the supplies?"

The answer:  "It's too late today."  I countered with the fact that while it does take a little over a half hour to get to Lowe's, they were going to be open another 6 hours so we had plenty of time.  But no - we would go First Thing In The Morning.

Coupled with First Thing In The Morning was While You Were At It.  In the case of washing the car, well, as long as you were washing one car you might as well bring the truck around and wash that, and maybe spray on the tire dressing, and where was that stuff you use to polish the headlights, and get the extension cord and the shop vac so you could vacuum the inside and and and . . . .    and then you didn't have time to do all that so the cars would stay dirty until you did have time First Thing In The Morning.  Which might be a few more weeks.

But I'm not on that time frame now - and gradually I've been breaking the habit.  If I decide the car looks dirty at 6:00 p.m., I can grab the hose and bucket and car wash and 20 minutes later I have a clean car and I'm putting the stuff away.  I've started trash fires at 3:00 in the afternoon.  I can decide to do yard work at 5:00 or clean the bathroom at 9:00 p.m.  It really doesn't matter.

And sometimes I wonder.  What idiosyncrasies do I have that amused him?  Or annoyed him?  Or that he just got used to and didn't even notice anymore?  If the situation was reversed, how much would he be missing them?