Cutler-Time & MRT Anti-Rush
Episode 12:04:2023 - Prompt: Rush
Where Rush took me…
I was my father’s daughter when it came to punctuality. My dad could show up 2 hours to 2 days late for an event. He was known for it.
We called it being on Cutler-Time.
No matter how late he was, people were always pleased when he arrived.
It wasn’t surprising I followed his model.
Once I had a driver’s license & car, I would decide whether or not to go to school by the traffic light at E. Northern Pkwy & Falls Road.
If the light to turn left was green, I’d go to school. If all the lights were red, I’d wait for the left turn light to turn green.
The odds were pretty good that I’d go to school.
However, if the left turn light was red, and the lights to go straight were green, I’d head out onto I-83 and not look back.
Baltimore City is not far from Maryland farmland. I drove through small towns, past fields of cattle, with the heat on & the windows down, listening to music. I don’t even think I was thinking about anything.
Perhaps living a parallel day to high school appealed to me.
I just wasn’t in a rush for anything.
Which brings me to after-hours behind the MRT.
I don’t know what it’s like to be under 21 in 2023.
But when I was under-21 in the late 80s, I lived a life exactly like my friends who were 23, 25, 30, and so on. If I ever got carded to go into a bar, I don’t recall.
The Mount Royal Tavern is a landmark right in the heart of the Maryland Institute College of Art’s unofficial campus. As a private art school in a major city, the school’s buildings encompass the radius of maybe 2-miles.
Imagine, most everyone in college is under drinking age for at least a couple of years. There were “regulars” who graduated to working the door and checking ID’s at night, but it was rare to be turned away.
My place in this world was complicated.
I was the daughter of the academic dean, a student at times, and part of a social scene that often began and, later, ended its night at the Tavern.
Remember, I didn’t discover my ambitious side until much later in life, and my early lack of ambition was validated by the “salad days” of young adulthood.
For every moment I didn’t rush, I was rewarded with outstanding experiences.
The kind you see in movies of young people getting away with being young & free. Nothing bad happened… (this was a few years before heroin hit the scene).
Like most nights, my friends (a random assortment) would end up “out back of the Tavern” after last call to dream up the next mid-summer adventure.
LSD could be taken. Or mushrooms. Or nothing at all.
It was hot & muggy, and one of my besties, Alison F, decided we should drive out to a lake and swim. A bunch of us piled into her Volvo station wagon and out we went.
We were there for hours, quietly swimming in the dark. Maybe there was some beer. Maybe some weed. But the outing wasn’t fueled by substances.
We just weren’t in a rush.
By daylight, we drove back to the city in silence.
And, because none of us had M - F, 9 - 5 jobs, we didn’t consider the morning rush-hour traffic jam we’d hit.
Like fish in a fishbowl, wet hair & clothes, packed into the Volvo, satiated with nature, we looked out at people driving alone to work.
Eating breakfast in the car.
Putting on make-up in the rearview.
The stark contrast of how their day & our day was going to unfold was obvious.
Once Alison F got the Volvo out of traffic & back to the Tavern for coffees, we started laughing.
No words were necessary. We all knew.
We were different. We didn’t want to be in a rush.
YOUR TURN: I thought about how long I take to make pumpkin pie from scratch, how I can’t rush the process of pumpkin flesh breaking down in brown sugar, and how SmartStoves and other devices speed up the cooking process.
But why?
For as long as it takes to cook something delicious, it still takes us about 10-minutes to eat it. How much more time do we need that pasta water should come to a boil in 40-seconds?
There is a ninja level to RUSH that comes in handy under extreme circumstances, but in general RUSHING causes waste, accidents, and mistakes.
Where does RUSH take you?
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“Hurry, hurry, hurry” I said to my children, three times like Henny Penny. “We’re going to be late for school,” I said, as if the sky was falling. During the work-kids years, “hurry” was the number one word out of my mouth every morning, and later in the day, when we rushed to after school activities. Rush, rush, rush. And then the work-kids life was over. Now in my third stage of life, I still rush around aplenty, tending house and home, husband and dogs. But then I settle, listen to the leaves rustle in the wind, practice my flute, perhaps get a little reading and writing done. Sometimes I miss the “hurry” years, but the “rush” I enjoy these days is from creativity. That is, until the end of the day when we say, “Hurry up,” to our dogs, before we tuck in bed for the night. “Hurry up!” our command for them to relieve themselves—to rush outside and get the job done. Some things don’t change, or should I say, some people.
I miss reading so fervently that I had to put my hand over the next paragraph to stop my eyes darting ahead.
I used to love staying up late to find out the ending. These days, if I try to read in bed I fall asleep or reach for instagram to look at something I don’t have to concentrate on.
I remember I stayed up all night to read the last Harry Potter book. I had just turned 18, and my friend drove us, along with my brother, to buy it when it launched at midnight.
We vowed not to sleep until we’d read the book. In the end, it was so late in the morning when we finished that we just powered on with the day.
Last year, my boyfriend took me to the Harry Potter studios for my birthday. He had never read the books or seen the films. He normally works really long hours but the week leading up to our visit, he was off sick, so we were able to rush through the films in the evenings. One night we watched three. It was one of the best weeks of my life!