Brick

Copy­right 2005 Ben S. Pollock

Wednes­day, Dec. 28, 2005. Wait­ing. Some Enron exec­u­tive pleaded guilty today to being a crook. Enron? Wasn’t that way back? (Wait here, I’ll check.) The cor­po­ra­tion filed for bank­ruptcy in 2001.

He’s a crim­i­nal who hurt thou­sands of employ­ees, yet imag­ine wait­ing four years to learn how long your prison term was going to be. He was out on bond for four years, and today dis­cov­ered he’ll be in the pokey for the next five. He’s got it coming.

Still, how did he wake each day? You don’t have to feel sorry for the guy just to wear his bathrobe (moc­casins optional) as he brushes his teeth every morn­ing for four years. Imag­ine the weight of the Wait.

I have a Wait for some­thing big. There’s no clue if I’ll get it. (Not a hol­i­day gift nor a court ver­dict.) Worse, the deci­sion has been delayed by more than a month. When it finally comes, that call will change sub­stan­tial parts of my life. A Wait thus defined always means high stakes.

Every day since July or Sep­tem­ber (when the Wait began is not clear), I won­der, will I hear today? If Yes, what will I do next? If No, what to do instead? Just like the rest of the future, the temp­ta­tion dur­ing a Wait to con­sider is in direct pro­por­tion to its unpre­dictabil­ity. Day­dreams and day­mares are irre­sistible, both of which waste time and heighten anx­i­ety. It is a clas­sic Wait: I can’t hurry it or add to the prob­a­bil­ity of suc­cess. All that’s left is to stew.

An early Wait: Let­ters from col­leges as a high school senior: Yes, No and Finan­cial Aid (a No there kills the Yes). Most of my 20s was spent in one Wait or another: Bet­ter job, a girl­friend who might be The One. Waits were eas­ier to take in my 30s. I don’t know why.

Through­out 2001 news­pa­pers nation­wide were cut­ting back at record lev­els: Would I be down­sized? In Sep­tem­ber, the answer came. The Yes came from my edi­tor. The human resource direc­tor, there as wit­ness, held my hand as I teared up — for all that worry, I was sur­prised. (I was put, and appar­ently remain, on that paper’s “eli­gi­ble for rehire” list so the fir­ing indeed stemmed from finances, not me.)

In 2005, more news­pa­pers were doing larger lay­offs, still I have yet to worry: I trust this pub­lisher. Of course, there’s two days left in the year.

Other peo­ple always cause the Wait. Sure, you may have asked this per­son or that for some­thing so you bring it on ini­tially, but the Wait always is at the hand of an Other. The weather per­haps could bring on a wait, but an ago­niz­ing one? Hardly. The econ­omy? I didn’t get a pink slip from Wall Street.

Var­i­ous Waits have dark­ened so many days I oth­er­wise would have enjoyed. Waits for Some­thing Big appar­ently — how come no one told me? — are a part of what I call a life well-lived, where one strives for more even after you’re not that young any­more. Too bad any Wait is mis­er­able. Too bad it must con­tain by def­i­n­i­tion the seed of fail­ure. It means, in a word, Risk. –30–