Time Life Wife

Sometimes the line between my blogging and my personal writing blurs to the point of being invisible. Yesterday I posted some stuff here that I later found hiding in the novel I'm working on.

Like many small children, young Elizabeth was impulsively impatient. A family trip to Disneyland was the first big event ravaged by her resistance to waiting, and may have even spawned her younger sister’s career as a hypnotherapist. Unwilling to walk away from a much-anticipated ride on Space Mountain, little Faye entranced Liz with a steady stream of happy chatter during their tedious two-hour wait. Liz grudgingly toughed it out, but it was the beginning of the end. When she later refused to stand in lines at the Washington Monument, the Empire State Building, and the Statue of Liberty, her mother decided to give up destination travel in favor of low-key vacations at the beach.

Even as an accomplished fundraiser for Duke, Liz’s impatience shows through. Once when she and her boss Sally had spent an hour in a San Francisco hotel lobby waiting on a big donor, Liz explained the logic behind her sensitivity.

‘Start with the word time,’ said Liz. ‘Take the t and the m, and replace them with l and f. That changes time into the word life. And how we spend our time is exactly equal to how we spend our lives. Like right now? This is how we’re spending our lives, Sally. And right now. And all the right now’s we’ll ever know. Time is the currency of life.’

Sally was caught off guard by the philosophical outpouring. ‘Lucky you didn’t make the l into a w. Because then life would be wife and we’d all be in trouble.’ She looked around the lobby for Mr. Big, but spotted instead the entrance to a posh urban shopping center. ‘Let’s make sure I’ve got this straight. How I’m spending my life right now? I’m waiting in a hotel for some asshole who thinks I have nothing better to do.’

‘Correct.’

‘And by jumbling a few letters around, I can say, “This is not how I’m going to spend my life.”’

‘Or your wife.’

‘Well.’ Sally cleared her throat. ‘This is not how I’m going to spend my wife. We’ll call the jerk later. Let’s go shopping.’ Which they did, leaving the million-dollar man to wonder why Duke University wasn’t lapping at his boots.