no such thing as too early

My mom once arrived for a funeral before the bereaved family.  The thought of being late paralyzes her with fear.  

Last night we make a plan.  I’ll get up at 5:30. We will leave the house by 6.  We will stop at the Daily Brew for a takeout muffin; we pass right by it on our way to the bus station, where I will be catching the 6:50 bus to Providence.  

At 5:25 I hear my mom' s footsteps on the stairs.  "Are you up?"  I should have told her I'd get up at 5:35. 

I get ready and we are in the car at 6:05, five minutes behind schedule.  My mom says, "We don't have time now to stop for your muffin."  The bus stop is less than a twenty-minute drive from the house, though my mom claims it takes much longer.  She worries about traffic, though there's never any on the back roads we take to the bus stop.  In fact, there are rarely any cars at all on these back roads.  Reluctantly, and with great anxiety, my mom agrees to stop for the muffin.

We pull in to the Daily Brew and my mom says, "Please hurry."  She sounds worried.  Does she think I might become sidetracked in this little coffee/ muffin shop and start buying multiple muffins and coffees of different sizes and flavors?

I am back in the car and we are on the road at 6:15.  My mom has kept the car running.  

We want to see how long it takes to get to the bus stop from my mom's house.  So we need to calculate how long it's taken to get to the muffin place.  I say it's about five minutes.  My mom is adamant.  “It DID NOT take five minutes to get here.  It takes eight minutes to get to the Post Office which is much closer."  But the math works against my mom.    We have a total of ten minutes between leaving her house, parking, my getting out of the car, going into buy a muffin, paying, coming back in the car, and then pulling out.  I generously assign six minutes to the travel time and four minutes to the muffin-buying time. My mom reluctantly concedes.

All the way to the bus stop my mom is nervous I could miss my 6:50 bus.  "It often comes early, " she says.  "Yes, but it won't leave early," I tell her.  "You know, there can be traffic if we take 28 and don't take the back roads.  Plus, it's longer that way."  "But mom, that's irrelevant," I remind her.  "We ONLY take the back roads."

We arrive at the train station at 6:26, twenty-one minutes after leaving home AND making a four-minute or so stop. 

Now we have to wait twenty-four minutes for the bus to arrive.   But that's okay.  At least now my mom can relax and recover from this trying ordeal.