PATIENCE

We think of patience, when we think of it at all, as being a characteristic that is either present or not, either manifest or absent. In much the same way we say a person is short or tall, thin or fat, young or old, we say a person is patient or that patience is missing within. I was thinking about patience as I looked at this photograph, and realized that this conception of patience was incorrect.
Looking away from the photo for a moment and back in time, I see my seventeen year old self deciding that I wished that fair grail, the heart’s desire of all seventeen year old boys – a roll top desk. Never mind that there wasn’t really room for one in my third floor attic room, that I didn’t have the money for one, and that moving one to the third floor would result in the death or disablement of anyone foolish enough to try to maneuver one up the twisting servants’ stairs to my room– I needed one.
Seventeen years, however, were to pass before the salubrious confluence of enough money, a proper space and a well-made example. And it’s now just been seventeen years that I’ve had my desk.
And yet, there is that boat. To make a short story shorter, we arrived at a lakeside cottage where we had been told there would be boats aplenty, and so had traveled boatless to this quiet corner of the Adirondacks, only to find that the boats by the dock were unsuitable in every regard possible. They were ugly, badly designed, heavy and uncomfortable, lacking in even the most rudimentary of boatly qualities. I stood this state of affairs for but one day, and then, despite my tools resting at home some hundreds of miles to the East, I dashed off to a lumberyard, purchasing wood and glue, paint and varnish, and returned to home base where I built in one day most of a boat. But even lacking its fore and after decks, the craft I made and the paddle for its propulsion, was better than the other nautical options available. After the paint and varnish had dried, I tossed it in the water, and paddled off into the shallows to watch the minnows and spin bugs, the ducks and drakes, the reeds and flowers. Homely, perhaps, but otherwise, all one could want in a little gunkholer.
So here is the question– is a person who can wait seventeen years to buy a particular kind of desk but who can’t stand to suffer a set of misbegotten bastard boats for a mere week patient or not? We are the same person, this waiter-for-a-desk and this builder-of-an-instant-boat. I find this a conundrum. But whether sitting at my desk, or paddling in a small boat built with my own hands, I have still not found an answer....