On Waiting

In one of his excellent short stories, the Japanese author, Osamu Dasai, writes about a woman who goes to one of busy railroad stations every afternoon and waits for someone or something. The author doesn’t explain what exactly it is that she waits for.

A big crowd of people, disgorged onto the platform from the just-arrived train would get out of the station through the main exit and, without giving even a cursory glance at the woman sitting on a waiting room bench, hurriedly pass by her and disperse in all directions in great hurry. The woman character is like the two homeless men in Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece play, “Waiting for Godot,” who are waiting for a god to show up.

In any case, reading the Dasai story, I got the impression that she was simply enjoying the act of waiting. And that precisely was what bothered me because I am one of those who hate waiting as it seems to follow us everywhere these days, especially in big cities, forcing us to waste our precious time.

In the morning almost every day, a lot of people have to wait for a bus or subway train to go to work. If they want to avoid the crowd and drive their cars to work, they are likely to wait in heavy traffic jams in and out of cities. And they have to go through the process in reverse going home. And then, some people have to wait in lines to check out the foodstuff that their spouses had asked to buy at a supermarket on their way home or wait for their kids to finish up their classes at the cram school or after school activities. These are just a few daily chores for which many of us must feel, like me, that we are wasting our time waiting.

Growing up in Seoul in the 1940s, I have learned how impatient and intolerable I could become while waiting for someone or something. As a teenager, I often had to run on family errands that involved getting, for instance, the copies of official documents such as the family registration records at one of the city’s ward offices.

The officials in charge of petitions were always surrounded by lots of unruly people who were milling around, trying to jockey for the position that would attract the official’s attention and get his or her business taken care of ahead of others.

In relatively better organized public offices, visitors were asked to wait in lines. But there were invariably some brazen, aggressive late comers, trying to cut in, triggering hot arguments among petitioners that could develop into fistfights and scuffles.

Worse than the queue jumpers were those who would bribe officials to facilitate their business rather than waiting in lines. In addition to offering a white envelope containing some money, some petitioners tried to sneak a pack of cigarettes or even chewing gums into the pockets of officials in order to avoid standing in lines. Those were the people who would disrupt the fair and orderly process, prolonging the waiting times for others.

The cumbersome and irritating process of waiting in lines in old days had disappeared with the introduction of the electronic machine that would issue stripes of paper on which waiting numbers are printed in orders of the arrivals.

Welcome to the speedy and efficient digital age!

But wait. The dawn of a more civilized and computerized world did not solve the problem of waiting. Instead of standing in lines, we are now sitting on the benches and staring at an electric board until your number flashes on it. The new system prevents line cutting but it does not shorten the time of waiting.

There are all kinds of waiting and many of them are not necessarily irritating and trying your patience. In fact, you maybe forced to wait for quite a long time unexpectedly and yet, you don’t mind it at all, if you believe that exciting or pleasant happenings are awaiting you at the end of your waiting.

The most dreaded and uncertain kind of waiting would come at the end of our life. Some people don’t have to wait for death for too long, but a majority of old and sick people would have to wait for a certain length of time at home or in hospitals and that, I believe, would be the most painful and fearful waiting in life.

I had a dream the other day, in which I was riding what I thought was a taxi. It went through a long dark tunnel at a full speed. It was moving so fast that I crane my neck from the backseat in order to tell the driver to slow down a bit. But there was no one at the wheel. That meant that the car was moving by itself. I thought it was one of those newly developed driverless cars that were driven by computers or something.

As soon as the car shot out of the tunnel, I saw a beautiful panoramic view before my eyes. I sat back and tried to enjoy the scenery but the car came to a stop in front of a tall building. Inside, there was a cavernous hall that looked like that of an airport or bus terminal. And there was a long serpentine line of people who were waiting to get into another room located further inside.

The last person standing at the end of the line was a Caucasian man in his 70s. As I approached him, “hello,” he said, adding: “Welcome the gateway to purgatory.” I just nodded as I couldn’t fully understand what he was talking about. Somehow, I felt I had been brought to this strange place by someone by mistake.

“Excuse me, but can you tell me what they are waiting for?” I ask the man.

“All of us here are dead people, in case you hadn’t realized,” he said. “They brought us here and we are waiting to get into purgatory where our soul will be made clean and pure by suffering for our wrong-doing on Earth until we are fit to enter Heaven.”

Strangely, what he told me did not surprise me as though I have heard a similar story many times before. I asked him how long has he been waiting in line.

To my great surprise, he said, “Oh, about 10 days.”

“Ten days! You mean you have been waiting here that long?” I exclaimed. “I cannot believe it!”

“It’s nothing,” he said. “Time here is quite different from that on Earth. Ten days up here is about 10 minutes down there.”

“But how can one stand on your legs for that long?”

“No problem,” he said. “As you can see we all lost our legs before coming up here.”

I looked around and, indeed, everybody is legless and floating in space slightly above the ground. They really look like ghosts.

“Oh my god!” I shouted involuntarily. And with that, I woke up.

It was just a dream. Lying in bed, I stretched my right arm down, groping with the hand for my legs under the bedsheets. Then, I gave out a great sigh of relief when I was able to make sure that they are still there.

(End)