Be prepared to get ready to make readiness preparations
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We are doomed to spend most of our lives getting ready for something and very little of our lives actually being ready.
We start getting ready to do something when we are babies, constantly gearing up for the next milestone in our young lives. Our little mouths are probed by our folks to see if we are getting ready to pop up some teeth.
When we start using furniture as support for our shaky, little legs, adults know that we are getting ready to walk. The various "goo-goos" and "gah-gahs" are sure signs that little Poindexter is getting ready to talk.
(Chances are that first words that Poindexter speaks will be either "no" or "gimme." Odds are that he will use his newfound speech so much that sometimes his folks will wish Poindexter had not gotten quite as ready to talk.)
I was a kid back in the days when there was not nearly as much history as there is now. Back then, kids had a relatively long time to get ready for kindergarten and their march through the following grades.
These days, kids don't have nearly as long to get ready for schooling. There are nursery school, pre-school and pre-kindergarten. Little Clarice has to start getting ready for education not too long after she has started to string a few words together.
The result of this is that Clarice might be writing books at an age when members of my generation were just getting ready to read books. (A few of my boyhood friends are still getting ready for that.)
Of course, each grade in school was getting us ready for the next one. I regret to say that I didn't see in that way at the time. I figured the teachers were in competition to see who could give us the most homework.
(My third-grade teacher, Miss Frumpwaggle, was the undisputed queen of homework as something to get you ready. She gave us enough homework to last until we were seniors. I'm not talking about high school seniors; I mean senior citizens.
We not only got ready in school; we also had to get ready for school. There were two types of this preparedness - daily and yearly. Each had miseries of its own.
In August, when the smiles of our parents and neighbors grew ever brighter, we knew that it would soon be time to get ready to go back to school.
In a classic case of adding injury to insult, we had to give up precious goofing-off time to go shopping for back-to-school clothes. It was like asking a convicted murderer to pick out the upholstery for the electric chair.
My two brothers and I had to be corralled like maverick steers and forced inside our family's old Buick, which was a strong as a Sherman tank and almost as stylish.
By a strange coincidence on this day, our dad always had something else to do, so our mom had to handle this enforced back-to-school ordeal on her own.
I don't know how she managed it, but by the time she got done, we each had a supply of school clothes and the salespeople at the stores where we shopped had a burning desire to find new careers.
The daily dash of readiness was hard on both parent and child alike.
It couldn't have been any more enjoyable for my parents to have to yell "Are you up yet?" than it was for me to come out of a deep sleep to mumble "I'm up. I'm up," before promptly returning to slumber land.
When we finally gave up and got up, there were only 10 minutes left to gobble down breakfast, rediscover buttons that had to be sown and pants that had to be patched and complete a science project that we suddenly remembered was due that morning.
After all that pandemonium and confusion, I wouldn't be too surprised if my folks would have been ready for a drink stronger than coffee if it were not so early in the day.
Of course, the situation could have been worse if we kids had not been so prepared to get ready once we got ready to get ready. (I am not ready to explain the preceding sentence.)
Even though we did not like to use it, we had the ability to get ready faster than you can split a second. Many guys have this talent, a gift that is primarily due to the fact that we usually don't care how we look.
This has been known to lead to marital discord when an otherwise happy couple are getting ready to attend a party or dance. Often a guy will watch a ball game until the last minute and be able to get ready to go in during a commercial break.
I could offer my views on why it often takes ladies longer to get ready, but I won't.
I may not ever get ready enough to chance that.
(Kozlowski, a freelance writer from Mount Carmel, composes "Walt's Way" for each Sunday edition.)
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