Ruled Lines

L.G.C. Smith

This is one of those topics I could write about for a year without exhausting my thoughts and observations. Yes, I think a lot about rules. As a child I was keen to learn and follow rules, whatever they might be. No hitting. No pinching. No biting. Don't touch fire or poo. All embraced and mastered early. Forks on the left, knives and spoons on the right. Got it. Line up quietly and calmly at appropriate times. No pushing or shoving, no pestering the other kids of disrupting the line. I loved that one.

It didn't take me long to notice that different people had different rules, both within families and in society. We moved a lot, and things were different in Billings, Montana as opposed to Ft. Defiance, Arizona, Guam, or the San Francisco suburbs. Family rules were pretty constant, though. When I was six, we had to be in bed by seven thirty, even in the summer because my mother was tired by then. All the other kids in the neighborhood got to play outside until it got dark, and I learned that rules aren't necessarily fair or palatable.

Thus started my internal negotiations with and meditations upon rules. They were generally to be observed, but they should also be questioned, and, at times, as I came to understand, modified, or, gasp, set aside.

For a long time this latter remained mostly a theoretical position. In day to day life, if there was a rule, I generally went along with it and didn't feel too constrained. By high school, I was a quiet, respectful, cooperative teenager. People looked at me and saw a rule-abider par excellence. Especially teachers, the narks who patrolled the school parking lot, and the attendance secretary.

By this time, I had been carefully observing all the kids who didn't follow the rules and what the consequences were in their lives. I'd realized that consequences were not uniformly or fairly meted out. Good kids could get away with all kinds of rule-breaking. Or kids who looked like good kids going on the Eddie Haskell principle. I could get away with breaking rules. So I started experimenting.

Sadly, I didn't venture into anything terribly interesting or rebellious. Drat that goody-goody core. No, my rule breaking mostly involved the relatively tame exercise of leaving the school grounds frequently without permission and writing my own notes to cover my many absences. No drugs (I was asthmatic -- I wasn't going to smoke anything, much less snort anything). No alcohol. No promiscuity. I ran errands and drove around. I did tend to drive fairly far afield. Half Moon Bay. Point Reyes. Sonoma County. Santa Cruz. Still. Not exactly bad ass doings.

It should come as no surprise that as a middle-aged adult, I prefer a quiet, orderly life. I often like rules other people think are stupid. For example, I still like proper lining up. I hate bus stops in Berkeley where people mill about in no discernible order. I am always acutely aware of who was there when I arrived and who came after me. There is a line in my head. I am disgusted by the general surge toward the doors that takes no account of this line.

No lines necessary at Garsdale Station

This is possibly why I like England and Switzerland so much. The English and the Swiss do lines beautifully, governed by the simple fairness of who arrives first. I understand this. People are not embarrassed to form a line, and I like that. It shows a willingness to be courteous and fair. I also understand that other cultures, including my own, are less structured and/or governed by different cultural values. But I will never like haphazard lines, cutting, or random behavior where there should be tidy lines.

Last fall when I was in England, at the end of a day trip to Carlisle, my parents, my cousin, and my sister and her three-year-old were on the platform at the train station waiting to return back to our house in Wensleydale. We were ready to line up, but being tourists, we waited for a few others to start the lines. As soon as they did, we picked one and joined, even though we had my mom with her bum hip, a small child who wished to be held, and twenty minutes to wait. It was a loose line as English lines go, but it was definitely a line.

Carlisle Station

Suddenly a woman appeared who looked like a line-breaker. I couldn't say how but I could feel her intent. My sister and I immediately shifted closer to the person ahead of us. The interloper took a couple of steps toward us on a trajectory that would have landed her two people ahead of us. Without a word, my sister picked up her daughter, thus increasing her bulk, and both she and I angled our bodies to give the line-breaker our backs and present a solid wall she would have to breech should she seek to persist with her unseemly quest. "You will not break lining-up (aka queuing) rules on our watch," we might as well have said.

The woman, probably a tourist or immigrant, or possibly Kate Fox doing research, huffed in disgust and scuttled off to break into someone else's line. Later, on the train, my sister turned in her seat to look back at me. "Did you see that woman?" she sneered. I knew exactly who she meant, and we both cracked up.

Proper people waiting to line up

All of us pick and choose which rules we like and which ones we want enforced, which ones we think are silly, or dangerous, but one thing is clear: rules are not absolute but they are absolutely impossible to avoid. Even those seemingly inviolable childhood rules -- no hitting, no pinching, no biting and so on -- can be tossed safely overboard between consenting adults. Rules are great, even when they suck, because they create conflict. Conflict makes us feel something, think, and act. It makes us grow and change and solve problems (often caused by rules). Rules are hugely productive. Especially for writers.