When I was
about seven years old, I remember sitting at the kitchen table in the morning,
eating oatmeal. It was a school day, and I do believe I was dawdling. My grandmother spoke sternly,
“Hurry up.
You’re going to be late.”
I was raised
by my grandparents and most likely they had little patience for a youngster who
was challenging, somewhat lazy, and stubborn.
I continued to dawdle.
Grandma had
a wooden paddle that hung on the wall next to the pencil sharpener behind the
kitchen door. It had a few cracks in it,
and I can assure you, I was never hit with it.
There were only moments of threats that often worked with intended
purpose. However, that morning I
remained steadfast in my dawdling until the paddle came off the hook, and
slammed down about 2 inches from my
elbow which was leaning on the kitchen table. A more emphatic stern voice repeated,
“Hurry up!
You’re going to be late!”
At
that point my dawdling stopped. I quickly finished my breakfast and hightailed
out of the house and off to school.
This memory
leads me to think that if I could have made the argument I was not dawdling but
merely lingering, perhaps to savor the wonderful oatmeal my grandmother had
made for me—you know, the kind with brown sugar and warm milk—I might have
avoided the dreaded paddle threat. But I
was not clever at age seven. And in
fact, under the circumstances, I was rather dutiful.
This
dawdling versus lingering seems a conundrum to me. Physically, both are exhibited in the same
way— “to move slowly and idly,” or “to spend a long time over something.” I’m guessing it’s the intent behind the
action that defines which word best describes what I was doing that morning
before school. And it does seem that
dawdling has a more negative connotation than lingering.
The older I
get, the more I seem to dawdle AND to linger.
In some cases, it’s either my knees or my memory that causes me to
dawdle. And in other cases, it’s my
sentimentality or perhaps my sense of spirituality that leads me to linger upon
those things I find worthy and meaningful.
Learning to
dawdle and to linger is a lifetime achievement.
Most of us in our younger days were discouraged from such behavior, but
now, if you happen to be in my generation of Baby Boomers, you might find
advantages to dawdling and lingering. After
all, are we not now in charge of our own paddles?
