~a column by Colleen O’Brien
The most methodical person I ever knew smoked one pack of cigarettes a day and used one packet of matches. Exactly.
This was just one of his methodical ways. His name was Cap and he ran the soda fountain at Tucker’s Pharmacy on the south side of the square.
He was more than 60 when I first knew him in 1958 when I went to work as a soda jerk. He was small and wiry — he could have passed for a jockey — and he always wore a short-sleeved white shirt, summer and winter. He taught me how to make sodas and sundaes and malts. Also how to wrap a package with pretty bows and end up with crisp corners and perfectly folded ends, no wasted wrapping paper. By his example I learned to consolidate tasks to the fewest possible steps.
He told me stories about people who came in the drug store. He knew everyone who crossed the threshold and he knew great gossip. He’d lived in town all his life, fought in the First World War and returned to run the store with his brother, who was the pharmacist. It was called Lyon’s Drugs.
He was as methodical in his likes and dislikes as he was in his habits. I could tell by the way he treated a customer how well he thought of the person. He could be as brusque and close-to-rude as any man I’d ever encountered. Sometimes I felt he wasn’t doing the business any good at all. But Cap didn’t care. By that stage in his life he had a set of standards and a background of experience that prompted him to weed out the characters he thought were beneath politeness. He just ignored them and let someone else wait on them.
If it was time for coffee and his third cigarette of the day, Cap let customers wait. If it was his lunch hour, he was gone. But if it was Saturday night and all the farm families trooped in at closing time after having seen the movie or listened to the band playing on the courthouse lawn, Cap would stay open till every last one had her root beer float.
He and his wife had me over for supper when I turned 16. I was urged to eat three hamburgers plus French fries and cherry pie. They served me chocolate milk. I was touched by the menu — to them I’m sure it was typical teenage fare. They had no children. Cap ate one hamburger. His wife told me he ate until he was full and then quit, no matter how tasty the meal. “It’s the secret to his trim figure,” she said, unbeknowingly amusing me with the “trim figure” phrase for a fellow and an old one at that.
While Cap took his after-dinner walk around the block, I helped with the dishes. She told me Cap was “a very Methodical man.” It was my first encounter with the word and I spelled it in my mind with a capital M because I thought it had something to do with Methodists. As I walked home later I thought about it, wondering if there were words like Baptistical and Catholical to describe. . . something.
Webster’s informed me that it meant orderly and disciplined and that those other words did not exist. The definition worked for everything I knew about Cap; he was methodical. Sounded boring to me, and since I wasn’t close to that behavior in any way except when I worked with him, I didn’t think too much on it.
My life went on. And on. I didn’t become methodical until my children left home. I don’t know that there’s a correlation, only that this is when it settled its mantle on me, a benign way to be — methodical. I fell into unhurried routines, eating the same breakfast for months at a time, vacuuming on Mondays, grocery shopping on Thursdays, etc. There was a serenity to methodicalness, and I remembered Cap. Had he always been thus or did he, like me, come to it late?
Maybe for us who aren’t born methodical or who haven’t had it inculcated into us we have to spend half a lifetime learning on our own that methodicalness can indeed bring pleasure and ease into our lives. I read recently that to make existence exciting and varied we should never fall into habits, that we should, for example, brush our teeth a different way every day. How many ways are there to brush your teeth? I am free now many extra minutes because I have a method to my minutes. I don’t have to think about a lot of really boring tasks, and my keys wind up in the same place every time.
Methodical entered my life in small doses, and I like not having to reinvent the wheel each morning. It allows me time to think about other things. Like the one thing I simply have been incapable of making a methodical part of my life: this would be my cell phone. I’m working on the methodical place to place it every time I quit talking or texting. It’s not happening. I don’t have another phone with which to call the lost cell. And often I’ve turned off the ringer because I am working or have company or some situation where I have to be polite, and I forget to turn it back on and I can’t find it for days.
I need to think like the most methodical man I’ve ever met: What would Cap do?
