Photo by Carol Von Canon on Flickr

The process of waiting has inherent conflicts in it.

A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander

Two scenarios about waiting:

At the Department of Motor Vehicles on Elston in Chicago people are lined up on the steps outside before the door opens. A greeter, who is more like a guard at a checkpoint than a maitre ‘d, asks your purpose, reviews your materials, and sends you to one door for a driver’s license or another door for plates. Once through the door, you wait in line to take a number. Of the dozen service windows, there are just a few open. It’s 8:30 in the morning, and the civil servants already look like they’ve put in a hard day or a hard ten or thirty years. The numbers are not sequential and seem to be called like random bingo numbers—B205, C784, A113. You sit on the edge of a hard plastic chair, Social Security card, expired driver’s license, passport, birth certificate, a postcard of the Black Madonna addressed to you at your new address, past due utility bills, a note from your mother clutched in your hand. These are the paper products that constitute your identity—so ephemeral and arbitrary. Since you can’t predict how long the wait is or where you are in the queue, it’s easy to become anxious, to anticipate that the next number, the next number, the number after, will be yours. Where is your number? Still in your hand. You are waiting and that is all you can do.

I was driving home from work along a familiar interstate when my car suddenly lost all power. I jerked the steering wheel to the right and managed to pull over to the shoulder out of the stream of traffic, and put on my flashers. The car was dead as dead. The engine wouldn’t turn over and I couldn’t shift out of Park. I pulled out my AAA card, called for roadside assistance. and made a second call to leave a message for my girlfriend to say I was waiting for a tow and she should not linger at the office because the dogs would be waiting at home. AAA was on the way but considering the traffic, the time of day, and the fact that my car wasn’t spewing black smoke or blocking an intersection, I knew my rescue would be farther down the priority list. So I waited. I watched the traffic rush past me, I moved my seat back; I adjusted the side view mirror so I get see when the tow truck pulled up. I entered the “waiting room”:

…a floating time, completely free of usefulness, suspended between wakefulness and sleep. This is the time zone of wonder, when we fall out of the habitual, the taken-for-granted, and are startled by what is.

The New Yorker, “Fall from Grace,” Noelle Oxenhandler, June 16, 1997.

Such moments are increasingly rare in this day and age of instant gratification, of expectations of round the clock productivity, of the immediate, insistent now. Personally, I have a hard time putting a sentence on paper without interrupting my keyboarding to check email, to have a conversation with one of the dogs, or to think about something to eat and then a rationale for either eating or not eating. We are in a hurry to get to the next thing, the new thing, to check it off our list, and move on.

In my current life I rarely experience the world in this state of present tense, or perhaps more accurately: present perfect tense, an action that happened at an indefinite time in the past or that began in the past and continues in the present. Present perfect.

If we were lucky we visited the waiting room as children–not as children ten years ago—but as children twenty or more years ago, in a time of fabled childhoods when the expanse of summer vacation stretched out endlessly, a luxuriant meandering stream we drifted until the fall and the return to school; on the long distance road trip riding in the back seat being taken somewhere while the world of power lines, a field of sunflowers, gray snow in a ditch outside the car window flashed past; the religious devotion of lying in the sun, the book face down in the sand, eyes closed…

I love traffic, sitting at the doctor’s office waiting to be called to the examining room, waiting at the service center for the car to be returned to me whole and sound. While I’m in the present perfect, there is a full roundedness of the present that offers a pleasure of attention without the necessity of intense focus, an alert awareness of at this time, in this place.

The other side of waiting, of course, is when the edge of alertness tips into anxiety such as at the DMV: waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting in the wings, an accident waiting to happen. From the benign stasis that every writer who has submitted a story or manuscript for publication knows to the high-pitched whine of suspended animation anxiety that hospital emergency rooms provoke. Is it broken? Infected? Do symptoms point to a more serious condition? Is somebody going to die? Am I going to die?

In 2008 architect Jeffrey Inaba designed a waiting room for Policlinico Umberto hospital in Rome whose aim Inaba said is “to create an environment to cope with our restlessness, if not through easing the irritation of having to wait, then at least through distraction from it.” Inaba’s Waiting Room looks like a surreal cartoon, which Inaba describes as an “Alice in Wonderland mushroom meets solar-ray chomping Pac-Man.” The description alone makes me twitch and sounds perhaps too distracting?

I once spent a week waiting for a friend’s mother to die. She was dying at home. My friend’s sisters had the day shift. We waited at night, eating licorice and Necco wafers, waiting for the next interval to deliver morphine drops, listening to Jerry Vale and Joni James on vinyl, Ave Maria on an iPod dock; listening to her mother’s shallow breathing. Waiting. Like the cars that passed me on the highway while I waited for a tow, like the world going by outside the car window, people came and went: family members, nurses, children, a taxi delivering more medication from Walgreen’s. Time happened on another plane where a woman lay dying. The waiting was happening in present perfect progressive tense:an action that began in the past, continues in the present, and may continue into the future. Until it becomes the past.