Procrastination leads to misery, Eva knows, but yes, do something about it.
“Short reckoning makes long friendship.”
My mother was making a word cracker and looked at me over her glasses: ‘Do you know that expression?’
No, but the meaning is, I thought. Short reckoning, to be sure, familiar territory. Only: how long did it take you to master something like that?
Back to Krommenie, late eighties. I was 10 and wanted a guitar. I got one on loan from Pieter Groot, the boss of the shoe store. I happily took the thing home on my back, merrily I fiddled with it for a few weeks, squeaking and creaking I eventually came to a kind of Sunday Bloody Sunday.
Then it was done, as usual.
Yes, and then you have to return such a borrowed guitar, add a bottle of wine, thank you very much, but now I’m going to jazz ballet. But I didn’t. Why not, thirty years later it is impossible to find out. Too nonchalant, too lazy, maybe I still believed in the sweet lie that I would ‘really continue with it’ at a later time, an attitude that you can maintain for a long time, by the way, years later I also applied it to my Spanish course.
And so Pieter Groot’s borrowed guitar was soon gathering dust in a corner of my bedroom, the strings getting slacker, the frets getting duller. The longer I kept the guitar, the less I dared go near the shoe store, until I didn’t dare to return that guitar at all because, tadaa, it had taken so long. What remained: the eternal burden of debt, which can no longer be resolved, because Pieter Groot died, and I still have that feeling thirty years later, the small revenge of the creditor on the debtor.
Now this happens to you exactly once you would think, after that you know better, but that is beyond the human condition, they have made it a saying for a reason.
Thirty years later it still happens regularly that someone calls me at a moment when I don’t have time for it, after which I resolve to call that person back that evening, which I then forget, after which I think about it every day, without to call them back because they are busy and important again, and because I think they deserve to be called back at a time when I really have time for that, which is never the case, so it doesn’t happen. Result: a slumbering, bad feeling that subsides at first, but is completely back the moment the other person makes another attempt.
Last, company party in an unheated hall, cosmopolitan company of writers, scientists and television people around us. The woman I treated unfairly years ago stood in front of me and said it was okay, sand it, don’t give a damn girl, we’re all wrong sometimes, but I grabbed her arm and held on, no no, it had been stupid, downright immature behavior, sorry sorry sorry, i couldn’t stress it enough.
With the hangover came the realization that I should have called her a long time ago, straight up and of my own accord, without the luxury of chance meeting, at least without that booze-enhanced air of self-pity, but that was in retrospect. This labyrinthine behavior will of course go wrong, but I’m doing it for you so you don’t have to make that mistake. So go, call, make it up, keep it short, do it today, thank me later.