Time in a Bottle

I've been thinking about time lately, and how time means absolutely nothing to most of us until we don't have enough of it...just like sugar when you're making cookies, or air when you're at the bottom of the pond. For example, if I'd been even a half second faster on August 9, 2007, my car would not have been totaled by a garbage truck.

But it's come to my attention recently that timing is everything. Example: two months ago I went to the beach with some friends. It was a zillion degrees out, and I was super hot and sweaty, and looked horrid by the time I got home. While I was fishing all my beach junk out of M's trunk, a car pulled up behind us, and a couple guys jumped out. I thought nothing of it, and went on piling my towel, bag, book, and other beach necessities onto the lawn, and I waved at my friend as she drove away. The guys approached me, and said, "Are you Mormon?" which I thought was totally weird, but I nodded, and they said, "Oh, we saw the BYU license plate holder, so we pulled over."

Turns out they in town for the weekend, and were looking for a place to live, and there just happened to be a vacancy in my building. They wanted to get a feel for the building, so I (foolishly?) let them in and showed them my apartment, and they called the manager and got a quick show-through of the empty unit. They flirted it up, and said since we had 3 apartments of LDS girls in the building, we needed some guys to protect them, blahdyblahdyblah, which I thought was an odd stab at a pickup line, but whatever. In the end, they didn't get on the stick, and the place was taken...end of story.

Or so I thought. A month later I had just parked my car after getting home from work, and I was totally amazed because the same guys were sitting on the side of the road, doing nothing. I walked up to them and said, hey, fancy meeting you here (was tempted to add "Judith Tremaine", for those of you familiar with Thoroughly Modern Millie, but refrained)! They were STILL looking for a place, as all the others they'd looked at had fallen through. So I recommended some places to look...none of which worked out, by the way. I was beginning to think that they were (a) cursed, or (b) had no idea how to lock in housing. (Notice it didn't even occur to me until just now that I might be giving them bad advice.)

However, through the grapevine, I heard they found a place in Inglewood (better them than me). On Sunday, I was invited to dinner, and couldn't get in because the doorman said the inhabitants weren't answering the phone, so we (two other girls and I) decided to wait around for ten minutes. Ten minutes expired, and lo and behold, as we were walking out the door, starving, who is standing there, but those guys! Turns out by some weird fluke the guy whose apartment we were having dinner at had only had met those three dudes in LA, and no one else...so I randomly had dinner with them.

If I'd gotten home from the beach a few minutes later, I never would have met those guys. If I didn't take so long deciding what to wear in the morning, I would be earlier to work. And if I don't take time to say "I love you" to the people who matter most, it may be too late. Because you can't keep time in a bottle to save it for later, as if it were a jar of home-canned peaches, so I'm going to stop blogging and go tell them how I feel, because if I don't, it might be too late.