Procrastination lesson learned early

It’s late afternoon on a Thursday, and I’m writing my column for next Wednesday.

Why is that?

Because I fear my own ability to procrastinate.

For most of my 70-plus years, I’ve been able to keep the procrastination tendency in check.

One of the great disciplines of a career in journalism is that you learn to meet deadlines. You also learn to fear them.

And you learn to recognize your own weaknesses when it comes to putting something off, then putting it off again, then trying to forget about it entirely.

That bit of self-knowledge arrived for me in the fifth grade.

Learning it was painful, and I’m still embarrassed by it.

But the time has come to confess.

Fern Chandler had an assignment for us. She was my fifth grade teacher at Judge Haynes Elementary School.

She was a little stern and occasionally cranky. Who wouldn’t be with a crowded classroom of about 40 fifth graders?

But she also had a softer side. She liked to read aloud to the class on Friday afternoons, when most of us were already daydreaming about the weekend. On one stretch of afternoons, she read “Charlotte’s Web” to the class, introducing us to one of the best books for kids ever written.

Her assignment — the one that would cause stomachaches and insomnia and fifth grade anxiety — involved South America. That’s what we had been studying in geography.

The assignment was to write a letter to the tourism officials of a Latin American country asking for information, then write a report on the country and present an oral version of the report to the class.

Sounds simple, right?

It would be if you wrote the letter.

To make matters worse, I agreed — apple-polisher that I was at the time — to take two countries: Chile and Nicaragua.

But after receiving the assignment, I promptly shelved it in one of those corners of the brain reserved for procrastination.

The assignment, as I recall, came in the fall or winter. The reports weren’t due until the spring.

Piece of cake, said the fifth grader. I’ll do that tomorrow.

But I didn’t. And I didn’t do it the day after tomorrow either.

Weeks passed, and as they passed that stuff I’d shelved in the corner of my brain came back to haunt me.

My failure to write the letters would plague me after the lights went out at bedtime. Tossing and turning, I would promise myself that I’d zip off those letters the next day if only I could go to sleep.

But the next day, the assignment would be shelved again.

And the deadline kept approaching.

Meanwhile, my classmates — those unafflicted by procrastination — started giving their reports.

I managed to produce the written versions of mine with thanks to the World Book Encyclopedia in the family den, but my classmates had brochures and responses in writing to show when they did their oral reports.

When my turn came around, I did what most fifth graders would do: I lied.

(Even now, that confession hurts.)

I told Mrs. Chandler that neither Chile nor Nicaragua had responded to my letters. Obviously, their tourism officials were asleep on the job.

The unlikely coincidence probably caught her attention, but I was able to limp through the rest of the assignment without too much humiliation.

Until later, when the memory lingered.

And lingered.

That’s a long answer to the short question of why I would be writing a next Wednesday column on a Thursday afternoon.

But that experience continues to shape my life. 

When I go on vacation, I leave columns behind for advance use. 

When I have worked overseas, I have left advance columns behind. There have been times that my columns have been written as much as six weeks in advance, simply so I won’t have to worry about missing a deadline.

And as to Nicaragua and Chile? Well, I’d still like to visit both of them one of these days, if only to honor the memory of my fifth grade teacher.