My father was the consummate New Yorker: never in his life was he patient. He died three years ago today, at the age of 84, having never learned that particular virtue.
To be honest, our family never considered patience a virtue. Patience, we thought, was for people who don't have enough to do. Patience indicated, we thought, a lack of imagination. Patience was, in our unspoken but shared assumption, the minimum wage of virtues: it hung out, did as little as possible, and still got rewarded.
For my father, the Third Avenue bus was always too slow. The line at Met Foods never moved fast enough. Even the microwave took so long to heat soup he'd swear at it and mutter, "At least with a pot, you get to stir. You don't just stand around like a moron." He spent his life rolling his eyes and saying out of the side of his mouth "C'mon already. I don't have all day."
The photographs of him from his time in the Army Air Force during WWII - he flew twenty-three combat missions - show him sitting around with a bunch of other boys smoking and laughing. He looks happy and anxious. Stationed in England and in Italy, the backdrop never seems to change. There are some Liberator bombers on the tarmac behind him, the sun is always shining, his curly black hair is slicked back and short, his teeth look very white in his bright smile, but in his eyes, I see a familiar look: he'd rather be in that plane than on the ground. He'd rather get it over with than wait for it. He'd rather be terrified and active than serene and passive. He wasn't a pilot. He was a radio-operator and a waist-gunner. He never ran the show, but he knew what his part was and he wanted that show to begin. Quiescence was not a talent that he had, even then.
Impatience is something we learned very fast, my brother and I, growing up. We learned to hate red lights, slow talkers, and people standing in front of us. My mother was the only calm one in the family. But since she died very young, her legacy of meekness and forbearance was eclipsed almost instantly by my father's unwillingness to suffer fools gladly. Anybody outside the family was a fool. Pretty much anybody inside the family was one too.
I thought I'd get away with never having to learn patience myself. Even now, when my students at the University of Connecticut tell me I speak too fast during my lectures, I tell them life is short, listen faster. Secretly, I always felt as if I'd escaped the need to learn patience because I'd avoided having kids. Although I helped raise my two stepsons, I met them when they were young teenagers. They required understanding, a sense of humor, and money for gas. Not having an infant meant I never developed the gentle, self-possessed poise that's necessary to help a child learn to speak, learn to walk, and learn to enter the world. I skipped that part.
But during my father's illness I learned that the noun "patient" and the adjective "patient" are -no surprise - not merely etymologically bred from the same root (the Latin present participle pati, to suffer): they also hold within them the seeds of what's necessary when dealing with death. When someone you love is a patient, meaning that he is suffering, enduring pain, indignity, and helplessness, the only thing that you can do is find patience in yourself.
Curled like a claw in his hospital bed, unable to move and barely able to speak, I remember a look in my father's eye like the one from those photographs of him at 19 during the war. My father, forever the New Yorker, was always thinking "C'mon already. I don't have all day."
And one day, finally, he didn't.
