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Your 648 words of spring awakening

By Ed Goldman

GIMME A FOR-INSTANT—One of my favorite “Peanuts” comic strips, out of a list that soars into the hundreds, is from the feature’s early days. Charlie Brown tells his eternal vexer Lucy Van Pelt that he’s invented instant water. She asks how it works and he takes an empty cup to a garden tap and says, “You just add water.”

At the time—probably the late 1950s or early 1960s—American advertisers were as much in love with the word “instant” as they’d later be with the terms “automatic, “hands-free” and “A-I.” While reflecting what we’d soon become, they were pushing us toward being a nation that demands immediate gratification. 

We would grow to love instant Folgers’ Crystals, TV dinners, In-N-Out Burger, Nestle’s Quik and even frozen-concentrate lemonade (though making the real thing can take less time). We wanted to know the precise amount of time it would take to have our car washed, our IRS refunds to arrive in the mail and our suits Martinized (while never asking what the hell Martinizing was). 

When those weren’t fast enough, we developed emails, texting and all sorts of communication systems seemingly designed to make us feel guilty for not responding sooner to someone.

For example, many of us prided ourselves on answering inquiries swiftly—not for any high-minded reasons, just from a sure knowledge if we didn’t do it immediately we’d totally forget to do it. Ever. 

Even so, when we used to communicate largely by phone and via the U.S. Postal Service, I recall an almost delicious sense of leisure in knowing I had until five p.m. to get to the post office to send off a letter, which usually ensured it’d arrive in the correspondent’s mail the next day. This would sometimes net me a compliment comparing me to the Norse god of speed Hermoor or the fastest cartoon mouse in Mexico, Speedy Gonzales. (Yes, I’ve always maintained a diverse set of pen pals.)

These days, though, if someone sends me a text or email at eight-fifty a.m., it sometimes arrives with the unspoken presumption that I’ll reply by eight-fifty-five a.m. And God help me if ten a.m. rolls around and I still haven’t responded. It’s not infrequent when that occurs for the sender to later inquire if I’d been feeling all right that morning—or perhaps, though it went unsaid, if I’d died.  

I’ve found that by answering honestly—”Yeah, just asleep” or “Yeah, but I didn’t think you were in all that damned a hurry”—I can lose a friend. Instantly.

APRIL SOURS—In his epic poem “The Waste Land” (which wasn’t about the community plan update for the Gaza Strip), T.S. Eliot famously called April the “cruellest month.” (That’s how we spelled “cruelest” back then before we got the L out of doing that.) 

April, which pops up this coming Tuesday, is one of our most evocative months. The fourth month of the year begins with April Fool’s Day, the annual event that encourages the resident idiot in your workplace to pull outdated juvenile pranks, like Xeroxing his butt—whereas with today’s tech, he could actually provide a 3-D copy of it. 

April also has Earth Day, that split second in eternity when wearing your hideous Birkenstock sandals to work will make you seem hip.

Easter arrives this year in April (on the 20th) and kicks off: (a) the second quarter for businesses that are on the January-February calendar; (b) the final one for those on the July-June fiscal calendar, and (c) the first month for businesses on an April-March fiscal year.