The Jail Book, 1886 – 1919

     I don’t know which is worse: a really, truly deadline or a self-imposed deadline.  Perhaps they amount to the same thing.  They both lead to that favorite statement of all procrastinators, “I work better under pressure.”
     For me that isn’t really true.  I don’t like to be last minute about anything, much to my husband’s annoyance sometimes.  I give myself extra time to get to appointments, or to  social engagements, or to make it to the airport.  Never mind that the airlines already insist on extra time, anyway, and you end up cooling your jets (so to speak) for way too long.  It’s almost a genetic thing – I need to be early, rather than late.
     But, if it’s genetic, it didn’t come from the Espy side of the family.  My grandfather, Harry, was infamous for being late or, when it came to meeting trains and boats, barely on time.  When he had to catch the steamer from Nahcotta to South Bend, he would send my mother and Willard up to the crow’s nest in the attic where they would watch for the Shamrock or the Reliable coming across the bay.
     “When it would get to just a certain point,” my mother would recall, “we’d call down to Papa who was usually in the nursery trimming his whiskers.  Then he’d dash to the front door, where mama would be waiting with a cup of coffee, and on out to the street where Ed would have Papa’s horse bridled and saddled and waiting.  Off he’d go to Nahcotta.  He usually got there just as the boat was about to pull out.  He’d tie the coffee cup to the saddle, give Nick a slap for home, and jump from dock to deck without missing a beat.  He never missed the boat, either.”
     I remember my grandfather saying, “I’d rather be a little late than a lot early.  You waste a lot of time waiting.”  And I remember that, even as a young girl, I wondered whose time he was concerned about.  I think I decided early on that, unlike my grandfather, I’d rather waste my time than someone else’s.
     And so, I give myself deadlines so I won’t be late.  I met my latest one just this week when I turned in the first in a new series of history articles that I am doing for the Chinook Observer.  Editor Matt Winters has never yet imposed a time limit on me and, by the same token, I’m never sure in which issue of the paper my piece will appear.
     Just in case that happens soon, however, I’m already giving myself a deadline for the second of the series — which, by the way, has a working title of “Behind Bars in Old Pacific County.”  Not the tavern kind.  The lock ‘em up kind.