“Do these things start on time?” These were not the words I was hoping to hear when I answered the phone, particularly not en route to the ballet, running late, and trying to catch a Metro train. I should pause to specify that I was boarding the train alone, which is why I took my friend Yakov’s call in the first place.
“Yes,” I said, probably sounding a bit more short than I should have. “It’s a ballet.”
At this point, the train was pulling up to the platform. The best analytics Google had to offer told me I was beyond cutting it close. It was 6:40 and the curtain was going up on the Mariinsky Ballet at 7. It’s this train or miss the show. So I get on.
“Traffic is really bad,” he says. “The GPS says I won’t get there until 7:20.”
I’m unsure how well cell phones work when you’re jammed into a ’70s-vintage tin can with seats, hurtling through concrete tunnels underground. Supposedly the only thing blocking underground calls is that no company yet owns the underground airspace. I guess I’m about to find out.
I tell him that he should at least be able to come in after the first act. He’s in the process of telling me whether he considers Saint Petersburg ballet worth an additional half an hour in traffic when the connection cuts out.
Journalism has a few professional perks. One of them is the press pass to theater and art events that would generally be outside the budget of young professionals. It’s one I fully intended to take advantage of. As the darkness of the tunnel closed around me, I wished Yakov well. He was on his own now.
Grasping my phone tightly in one hand and my Metro pass in the other, I perched anxiously on the edge of my seat, trying to restrain myself from repeatedly updating Google Maps. At this moment I was quite literally a moving object coming up against something solid, fixed, and unchangeable: a deadline.
Time is your enemy.
It’s an expression my dad liked to repeat when I was a kid. To him, it encompassed several life lessons in a mere four words, conveying both the sense of never having enough time and also impressing the importance of punctuality.
I come from very punctual stock. And as I count down the stops between Dupont Circle and George Washington University, I feel like I have somehow let my forebears down. My grandfather, famous for showing up so early that my mother took to inviting him to dinner half an hour later than she intended to serve it, would never have been in this situation. Neither would my brother, who as a child once reset all the clocks in the house to run 20 minutes fast, just so he’d never be late. Or my mother, who would have told me to give myself an extra 15 minutes.
But.
But I was waiting for someone. Adopting a philosophy that any man who falls behind gets left behind seemed somewhat militaristic. And I’ve never liked feeling uncomfortably early, adopting the sort of extreme punctuality that makes you the first person to arrive at an event, rattling around with the inescapable fact that you are the only one here until the rest of the party arrives. Early has always seemed somewhat excessive. I strive for punctual, walking in the door like Phileas Fogg with mere seconds to spare. What I was trying to persuade myself was that this was a reasonable course of action. After all, I’m not like my Greek friend, who shows up to everything an hour-and-a-half late.
And yet, seconds to spare leaves very little cushion time for Metro trains, wrong turns, and friends who underestimate traffic.
No, I’m not trying to bargain. You can’t bargain with time, so this is more an attempt to rationalize. Yes, I could have left earlier, and probably should have, but I had waited for Yakov at the train station and he was late.
Of course, so was I. Where did that leave me? To quote Shakespeare, “the quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven.” Does that apply to the tardy as well? As I raced up the escalator and down the street, the minutes ticking towards curtain time, I vowed that from now on I would remind my friends of traffic, take an Uber, leave five minutes earlier.
In the end, I made it by the skin of my teeth. I earned some dirty looks from the ushers shooing me down the aisle, but as the lights dimmed, I was in my seat.
And Yakov? He appeared during the first intermission, having watched the opening act from some seats in the back of the theater—seats for those who came late.
