Parenthood, and the Chronically Late

It all comes from childhood.

There are two types of people in the world: People who are late all the time, and everyone else, the rest of us, constantly scrambling around trying to make up for how rude they are. Late people try to act as if their chronic lateness is some sort of charming personality quirk, like having a goofy laugh, or a dimple. But what a late person really is is someone who constantly lets you know that they don’t value your time — that they believe themselves more important than you. Always being late is not a fact of being. It is a decision you consistently make not to consider the lives of the people in your life. It is claim of dominion over others. It is some rude shit.

As you can tell from the above paragraph, I am, compulsively, obsessively punctual. One of the ways I first knew the woman who would become my wife and I were going to get along is that each of us showed up a half hour early to our first date; at opposite sides of the bar, we looked up, noticed each other and shrugged: Well, we’re both here, we should just start this date I guess. I am the person who gets to the airport three hours early, the one who will sit in the movie theater for 15 minutes before the first trailer begins, the guy who leave his house 45 minutes before a reservation that’s only 20 minutes away. If something impossibly…