The story goes that a British Royal was getting married, the wedding being planned with all the usual pomp and ceremony. The invitation list was prepared for the wedding. Royalty from all over the world would be invited to attend, of course, but there was one name on the list whose anticipated acceptance was causing concern: An African King notorious for his lack of punctuality. Clearly this could not happen on the day of the ceremony, but just as clearly, the King could not be snubbed. Since this was a delicate matter, a high-level diplomat was dispatched to meet with the King’s representative. The diplomat extended the invitation, expressing the Royal family’s earnest desire that the King would arrive in good time for the ceremonies.

The representative replied, “The King is never late.”

Tuesday, I was supposed to meet with my grandmother’s plastic surgeon while he attended to her leg; the appointment was for twelve noon. I’d been to his office once before, in mid-December, I knew it was uptown somewhere but couldn’t remember exactly where. The morning was busy, so just before I went out the door at 11:40, plenty of time to get me to a place five minutes away, I googled the doctor’s address by his last name and specialty; the map that came up indicated an address uptown. Easy peasy, I knew just where it was. So I drive up the freeway, get off on Sixth Avenue, drive up the street, turn left on Upas, down a number of streets, then at the corner of the street I know I am supposed to be on I don’t see the office, so I turn right, go up the street -- and can’t find the building. I go up another few blocks looking for the office but I know I’m in the wrong area, so seeing a doctor’s office nearby, pull over in the red, hop out and run to the door, where a woman is coming out and saying the office is closed, so I ask her, You wouldn’t happen to know where Dr. V’s office is, and she says Yes, it is down this street about a mile -- which is where I had been. So I thank her, get back in my car, make a U-turn, and go back down the street to the location where I’d been directed to by Google and this woman, and there’s the name on a building, it’s the right name, and says plastic surgeon, but that is not the office I’d been to before. I park there anyway, get out and go inside the building: No one there. I hallo a few times, finally a woman shows up at the desk and I say, I’m looking for Dr. V’s office but this doesn’t look familiar, and she says, oh you are looking for Dr. V’s brother (I mean give me a break, what are the odds of two brothers being plastic surgeons and practicing in the same area of San Diego?), and she hands me the brother’s card with his address and she is telling me how to get there and I am not listening, just nodding and thanking her and trying to get out, because the clock is ticking and how hard can it be to find, the other office is nine blocks down and one block over. I should have paid attention: I am in the area of uptown where every street either dead-ends, or is one way going the opposite direction I am, or hits the worst of the traffic streaming downtown or up towards University Avenue. When I finally arrive at the right office, I recognize it, park, and check the clock: 12:05. Oh that ain’t bad, she’s probably got another fifteen minutes to half an hour to wait. I get inside, go to the reception desk; off to the right, through an open door, I see the doctor attending to someone who is not my grandmother, so now I’m sure I’m good. He glances up at me and keeps talking to his patient. The receptionist tells me, Oh yes, your grandmother was here, the doctor saw her and she’s left.

Can you believe that? Whoever heard of a doctor seeing a patient on time?

I’ve worked at and quit more jobs than I can remember, but I’ve never been fired. I was very lucky during my work career that I got along well with my employers and they with me. I was, apparently, a good employee in most respects, given raises, bonuses, awards, recognition, promotions. The one beef nearly every one of my employers had with me was that I would arrive late to work. I was never terribly late, usually under five minutes, and I was not always late, but I was late often enough that sooner or later, I’d get the little friendly talk. But I was incorrigible; my bosses would eventually just give up and accept that it was what it was. This flaw was part of the package, and they each seemed to come to the conclusion that keeping the package was worth overlooking the flaw.

My children’s grandmother, Rest In Peace, worked as a bookkeeper at the old Naval Training Center. She got me a job as a clerk at the Uniform Shop on the base, two buildings away from where she worked in the laundry. Her son and I were living about two city blocks away from her home, so she offered to pick me up in the morning, and we’d ride in to work together. I’m not sure if the laundry opened early or she just liked getting to her job early, or was trying to avoid traffic, what I do remember is that I didn’t have to get to my job until about an hour after she started working. I wasn’t crazy about getting there that early, which meant I would spend time in the Mess waiting for my boss to open the shop, but I could have lived with it -- the problem was, we had agreed upon an hour, as I recall, 7:15, when she would pick me up, and then she would get there a few minutes earlier, like 7:10 or 7:05. I was not ready at 7:10 or 7:05. So she’d be waiting with the car running, and I’d be hurrying, stressed that I was rushed, but trying my best to get out of the house, and she’d be mad that I kept her waiting. I’d get in the car and say politely, Sorry, I wasn’t ready, I thought you were coming at 7:15. And she’d say, not so politely, Why do you wait until the last minute to get ready? Thus began a long silent battle of wills; I insisted on not being ready until the agreed time, she insisted on getting there earlier. Once or twice she got so frustrated, she would leave, and I’d have to catch the bus to work. I’d been working there a while when two incidents happened, both involving guns, and I flat quit. Looking back now, that’s the only time where I really do regret that I was slack, because it was inconsiderate of someone else’s time and efforts, a lady who after all had done me a favor getting me the job and was doing me a favor by giving me a ride every day. I console myself in knowing that in every other way we were close and loving until the day she died.

There have been variations to the pattern. Ten years ago, I was hired to work on a government project which required that we wear a security badge whenever we entered in, and were inside, the building. In all the time I worked there, I never once was late or forgot my badge. Then there was the time when I worked selling Avon; two months after starting out as a sales rep, I was hired as a Group Sales Manager, and did that for about a year until the GSM program ended. As part of the job, we had to attend two meetings per month, one a district-wide meeting which all the GSMs were required to attend, one a meeting each of us GSMs were required to host in our homes for the sales representatives in our area. I was good about the in-home meetings, usually had everything ready when the reps got there. But I was rarely on time to the district meeting. The District Manager never said anything about it, and would often even interrupt the meeting to introduce me when I came in the door. I was working so long and hard that it didn’t penetrate why I wasn’t being called to task for getting to the district meetings late; I assumed the District Manager knew that the work kept me extremely busy. Years later it occurred to me that if you were the top-recruiting Group Manager in the district maybe you could get to the meeting whenever you dang well pleased.

I wasn’t just late to work. Meetings, events, parties, dates, job interviews, jury duty. Like all dedicated funkers, I always had good reasons for being late. Once, I was sitting on a panel of prospective jurors waiting to be seated or dismissed in a civil matter; we were going through the selection process when the judge released us for lunch break. When I came back into the courtroom after the break, everyone was already there. The judge, the lawyers for the plaintiffs, the plaintiffs, the defendants, the defendants attorneys, the other jury panelists, all sitting in utter silence, as I opened the door and came down the aisle, taking my seat; apparently the bailiff had been looking for me, because as I came in the door, he hung up the phone and said my name. After a moment, when the proceedings began again, the curious incident left my mind. When we were sent out for another break later, I went down to the jury lounge, got a soda and sat reading my book, then at a few minutes before the time we were supposed to be back, I headed up to the courtroom again. Again when I went in, everybody was waiting in stony silence for me, apparently the last one to show up. This time, I was really confused and completely embarrassed: All these people, at God knows how much an hour, waiting for me. But I didn’t understand why, I had looked at my watch in the jury lounge and knew I wasn’t late. I looked at the clock on the wall -- which showed that I was late! I looked at my watch, and realized that my watch was running slow, apparently the battery was dying. Needless to say, when my name came up, I was quickly thanked and dismissed.

You’d think it would make a difference whether I’m going somewhere fun or somewhere I don’t want to be, but it doesn’t. Dance or doctor’s appointment, I’m equally late to both. Luckily with doctors, they are usually more late than me -- which sort of goes back to the initial idea of status. A close friend of my grandparents, José, was continually frustrated with his wife’s tardiness; this woman happened to be my childhood nanny, later working as a caregiver for invalids. He would wait in vain for her to show up somewhere some time anywhere near the hour she had said she would be where she was supposed to be, and it just would never happen; compared to her, I was a model of timeliness. She kept all of us who knew her waiting literally hours, sometimes wouldn’t show up at all, and never made any apology for it, laughed dismissively when anyone grumbled about her tardiness or failure to show up. José was a good-natured man, someone who made the best of things, but she would have tried a saint’s patience. One day when we were at my grandmother’s house, once again stood up as we had been waiting for her to eat dinner with the family, I said to her husband, “Well, you know how it is with these really important people. Lucky they deign to bestow their presence on us at all.”

A lot of my working life has been spent in offices as a secretary. One office in particular, I had to ride the trolley to the last stop downtown, by the Santa Fe train station. The trolley was usually empty by that point, and the trolley driver would slow the train down from the prior stop to that last stop in order to chat with me as I stood by the door waiting to get off. If the trolley had arrived on time, I should have been able to get to my work five minutes early; because the driver was so busy flirting, by the time I got off the train and ran the three blocks (sometime you try running three blocks in high heels), I would usually get to work a few minutes late. There was a private locked back entrance to the building, which opened onto a stairway leading to the second floor, and just off the landing was the secretarial area where I worked, with another secretary, the girl who had initially gotten me a job there as a file clerk; within days of starting my job, I had been promoted to secretary, and another file clerk hired. Besides our offices, there was a separate secretarial area and offices across the open corridor from us. When I would get there, the bosses, the secretaries, the file clerks, everybody on both sides of the corridor were already at work, and I would quickly settle down into my work. I worked into the evening most days and Saturday mornings to keep the office running smoothly and ahead of schedule on tasks; because of my skills and experience, I was given more complex assignments to do, the same if something needed to be done quickly and accurately, passing over the other secretary; I quickly surpassed her in pay as well, given a substantial flat salary when she hinted to my boss that I was getting paid for a lot of hours no one could verify. I knew my bosses appreciated my work; what I didn’t know was that my co-worker was now hinting behind my back about the one thing left she could find to latch onto: My being late. One day, late again, I had come in through the private entrance and was climbing up the stairs, almost at the landing, surprised when I heard my boss say, “You know I like Kathy, but she is always late.” I knew my boss well by then, knew he had wanted me to hear what he said, and I laughed to myself. I came up onto the landing, and looked over at the secretarial area; there was my co-worker at the computer; she wasn’t looking at me but she was smiling like she’d ate the canary (talk about stupid). My boss was standing there behind her chair, with a letter in his hand, pretending to read it. The secretaries in the other area were quiet, too. I started walking toward my boss, and when he looked up, I said, “I may get here late, but I’m worth waiting for.”

You should have seen the look on his face.