Honey bees aren’t fooled by spring snow.
I have absolutely no concept of time, unlike honey bees, who use the sun’s position and their own internal clock to stay on top of their schedule. This week I don’t even know what season it is, what with both snowfall and thunderstorms. But honey bees know it’s spring because the daylight hours are increasing. They are starting to search for early pollen when the temperature rises above 50 degrees.
I’m hoping the bees will teach my kids about punctuality, because I’m totally failing them. Fiona has 92 tardies, and Myles isn’t far behind. Let’s just say, we’re not Swiss. John, our resident timekeeper, reminds them to look at the clock instead of the comics in the morning. He spent years fuming at my inability to estimate time, until he learned to just stop asking. Because when I answer “I’ll be home in 10 minutes,” by 10 minutes, I mean “sometime before midnight.” But I found an upside to my inability to gauge time: I don’t have a degenerative disease!
I was jogging on a short route I’ve followed for years. I wear a watch to remind myself to be back home in time rouse the kids for school. The watch has been giving me hard data to suspect I have a feebling condition destined to restrict me to a labored crawl before my 50th. Specifically, it used to take me 30 minutes to run this route, but lately it’s been taking me much much longer, upwards of 45. I refined my diagnosis to a canine-born muscle eating parasite, because my slow-down started when we got Seamus. But this morning I ran the route in just 30 minutes. Seamus was, coincidentally, not with me. My science mind pieced it all together. Seamus stops constantly to sniff, pee, lick. And I slow down to accommodate. Cured!
I bumped into Sandy, a mom-friend I hadn’t seen in months, on my way home. We chatted while waiting out the crosswalk light. She had her dog with her, so I thought she’d enjoy hearing about my brilliant discovery.
“I even had a therapy plan,” I told her. “I decided I’d take whatever drugs I could get my hands on to stop my slow decline.” And medical marijuana. “But it turns out, I was just stopping for all the peeing and licking, you know, and not accounting for the time it added to my run.”
“There is a device you can get to fix that peeing when you run,” she informed me.
I know people like her manage time much better than I do, so I was interested in her advice.
“Really,” I said. “Like a catheter and pouch, or something?” No way would Seamus leave a rig-up like that alone. He’d slurp it down and play fetch with the deflated bag. The more I thought about it, the worse an idea it seemed. I’d get the leash tangled in his tubing. I really couldn’t to that to him.
The light changed, and she ran in the opposite direction back to her house. “I’ll text you details,” she yelled.
“Great,” I shouted back. “See ‘ya.”
Man-o man, I’ll take my tardiness over her extreme time-control measures any day, I thought to myself. My phone vibrated in my pocket, and I read Sandy’s text: RECOMMEND PESSARY RING. GOOGLE IT.
Lovely. Why do I wonder why I don’t have more friends? Why!?! The woman knows I can’t tell time. And now she thinks I lick my own pee.
