One Born Every Five Minutes

When I was very young, probably three or four, I couldn’t tell time. All of the clocks in our house were analog at the time, so it wasn’t really unusual, but it meant I had to just trust my parents when they told me how long something was going to take.

One morning I was up early, as young children sometimes are, and my dad was supposed to do something with me that day, but he was still in bed. I went in to wake him, and he told me to give him “five more minutes.”

Periodically, I would pop back in to ask if it had been five minutes yet — obviously not entirely clear on what those five minutes were meant to be used for — and was told no each time.

Finally, on about the fifth return to his room and being told it had not been five minutes yet, I loudly exclaimed that this was the longest five minutes ever.

My dad’s laughter finally got him up out of bed, and it wasn’t until much later that I realized that his “five minutes” had likely lasted closer to an hour.