Planes, Trains, and Chest Pains

Hello, hello, and welcome to T.E.A. Time with Tayvin Bayless.

If this is your first time here, welcome. Pull up a chair. I just took the pot off the stove. And if you’ve been here before, it’s good to have you back. I saved you the good mug.

Today’s story is about a night I planned very carefully, and a day that had other ideas. The phrase to go with that is “the best-laid plans.”

Let’s start in a field in Scotland in seventeen eighty-five. A farmer is plowing. A plow is a heavy farm tool that cuts through the dirt and turns it over so you can plant. As he plows, the blade tears open a tiny nest. A field mouse built it to get through the winter: a little pile of leaves and dry grass, about the size of a teacup. In one second, the plow goes right through it, and the mouse runs.

That farmer was the poet Robert Burns, and he wrote a poem about that moment called “To a Mouse.” He wrote it in Scots, the language of lowland Scotland, so the famous line goes like this: “The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men gang aft agley.” Schemes means plans. Gang aft agley means they often go wrong. In modern English, we usually say, “The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” Awry means off course, crooked, not the way it was supposed to go. Things go awry.

In nineteen thirty-seven, John Steinbeck took three words from that line, “of mice and men,” and made them the title of his novel. I read that book in high school, and it has stayed with me. So when I hear this phrase, I hear a farmer, a mouse, and a book I couldn’t put down.

So what does it mean? It means you made a careful plan that didn’t turn out as expected. That’s the important part. It’s not about bad planning. The mouse did everything right. It just didn’t plan for a plow.

You leave forty minutes early for a big job interview. Your shirt is ironed, your shoes are shined, and you’ve practiced your answers in the mirror. Then a truck spills forty thousand oranges across the highway, and you spend an hour watching people chase fruit. The best-laid plans.

Here’s how you might hear it:

“We booked the campsite six months ahead, and it rained the entire weekend. The best-laid plans, right?”

“I made a whole spreadsheet for moving day, and the truck showed up four hours late. Best-laid plans of mice and men.”

One quick note: most people only say the first half, “the best-laid plans,” and let the listener finish the rest in their head. It usually sounds like a sigh, said after something has already gone wrong.

On Tuesday, Emma and I had a plan. Tickets to a play, my mom lined up to watch Eliana, dinner packed, and the timing worked out almost to the minute. Let me tell you how long that lasted.

Emma and I had tickets to see Texas State’s production of All My Sons. It’s an older play, written in nineteen forty-six, just after the end of World War II. One of the central conflicts is actually based on a true story about an aeronautical company in Ohio. This company conspired, or secretly worked together, to sell defective aircraft engines to be used in the war. So, engines that shouldn’t have been on planes ended up on planes. Of course, the play also has a lot of personal drama, a bit of mystery, and a bit of romance. You gotta keep the audience hooked, after all.

Emma had worked as the photographer for the production, taking photos during rehearsals. This is an area she has less experience in, but with her knowledge of lighting and her artistic eye, I’m sure she’ll excel at it and have more photography opportunities in the future. Because she worked on the production, our tickets were free.

So here was the plan. The show started at seven thirty, which is usually Eliana’s bedtime, and my mom kindly offered to watch her for the evening. Most of the job was just being home while we were out. Emma had a later-than-usual meeting at the university and wouldn’t finish on campus until six thirty. So my mom would come over at about six fifteen, and I would drive dinner to campus, where Emma and I could eat and spend a little time together before the show. I made tacos and I’ll keep my comment brief, because they aren’t the main focus of this story. But I must say, they were delicious.

Six fifteen rolled around, and things were going relatively well. The food was made, my mom had just arrived, and I was almost ready to go. I hadn’t had time to shower and dress up for the show, so I took five minutes to wash up, two minutes to get dressed, and I was in the car and on the road by six twenty-five. Right on schedule.

I didn’t get far before Emma called. She had been sick for a while with a persistent cough, a cough that just won’t go away, and because of her asthma, it was likely to linger, or hang around, even longer. Over the past few days, she’d been coughing so much that her chest and neck muscles had started to strain. That afternoon she’d had a Teladoc visit, which is a video appointment with a doctor, and gotten a few prescriptions. One was to help her lungs recover more quickly, and one was a cough suppressant, a medicine to make the coughing less severe and less frequent. Could I pick them up on my way? Of course I said yes, and I stopped at our local Sam’s Club, right next to our house.

Now, I had already picked up an inhaler for Emma the day before, on Monday, from a different doctor’s prescription. The Teladoc doctor didn’t know that, and along with the other medications, included another prescription for an inhaler, unbeknownst to me. At the pharmacy, the pharmacist told me our insurance wouldn’t cover the inhaler, and we’d need to pay full price. I assumed she meant the inhaler from Monday, and that I just needed to make up the difference. So I paid. Then I looked in the bag, found another inhaler, and realized what had happened. The insurance didn’t want to pay for an inhaler when we’d already filled one the day before.

Even then, it might not have taken long, except I had paid with contactless payment, using a virtual card, so the pharmacy couldn’t refund the money to my card. They had to get a supervisor, who then issued the refund on a gift card. By the time all of that was done, it was seven o’clock.

And then came the train. I was just a mile from campus when I got stuck at the tracks, while a particularly, even frustratingly, long train leisurely went by. I had hoped to get to campus shortly after Emma got out of her meeting at six thirty. In reality, I got there at seven twenty.

By then, it had been an exhausting day for both of us. Emma was sick, her chest was sore from all that coughing, and she was not feeling her best. I was just beginning to feel under the weather myself. Neither of us had eaten dinner, and there wasn’t time to eat before the show started. All of those problems compounded, which means they stacked on top of each other and made each other worse. In the end, Emma made the decision to skip the show.

Instead, we sat in our car, parked just down the street from the theater, ate delicious tacos, and complained about our days a little. We commiserated, which means we shared our frustrations and felt bad together. And while we did, we could see people walking past us on their way to the show.

Then I asked Emma, since she had already seen the show, to explain the plot to me. She did a great job. It was almost like seeing the real thing. She did have one big advantage: she was the one who took the high-quality production photos, so she could use them to walk me through the show practically scene by scene.

We got home at eight o’clock, far earlier than my mom expected, just as she was getting ready to put Eliana down for the night. We thanked her for her willingness to help out, and almost immediately went to sleep.

Obviously, our night did not go according to plan. But in the end, I don’t think it turned out too bad. We ate some good food, had a good chat, and gave our bodies the rest they needed. All’s well that ends well.

Which is actually our second phrase for the day.

“All’s” is short for “all is.” So the full sentence is “All is well that ends well.” If the ending is good, the whole thing was good, or at least good enough. A good ending can carry the trouble that came before it.

You’re baking a cake for a friend’s birthday. You open the oven, and the middle has sunk like an old couch cushion. Panic. So you fill the hole with strawberries and whipped cream, carry it out like you meant to do that, and three people ask for the recipe. Nobody remembers the hole. All’s well that ends well.

A lot of people think Shakespeare came up with this one, because he wrote a play called All’s Well That Ends Well, around the start of the sixteen hundreds. But the saying was already around. In fifteen forty-six, John Heywood published a book of English proverbs. A proverb is a short, old saying that gives advice, like “look before you leap.” And in Heywood’s proverb book, you can find “all is well that endes well,” with an extra e on “ends.” The idea is even older than that book. Shakespeare didn’t invent the line. He took a proverb people already knew and put it on the front of his play, and the play is why so many people know it today.

Funny enough, both of today’s phrases got famous the same way. Somebody borrowed them for a title.

Here’s how you might hear it:

“The groom left the rings at the hotel, but his brother drove back and made it with five minutes to spare. All’s well that ends well.”

“I forgot my passport at home, and my neighbor brought it to the airport just before boarding. All’s well that ends well.”

One quick note: say it after the trouble is over, not in the middle of it. And be careful if someone is still hurting from what happened. If the ending wasn’t good for them, this phrase can sound like you’re brushing their problems away.

On Tuesday, the play still happened. We just weren’t there to watch it. We watched people walk past our car toward the theater while we ate tacos. Then Emma walked me through the whole show practically scene by scene, and we were home by eight and asleep almost right away. It wasn’t the ending I planned, but that doesn’t make it a bad ending. In this case, a train and chest pain may have led our best-laid plans awry, but a night that ends in good food and a nice conversation with my wife is a good ending in my book.

So here’s my question for you. When you make your next plan, maybe a dinner, a trip, or just a Saturday, what’s the one piece that actually matters to you? Not the tickets or the timing, but the part you’d still want if everything else fell apart. Before your next plan, try naming that one piece. That way, if the day goes awry, you have something you can look at to turn a disappointment into a good ending.

And with that, my cup is empty. Thanks for joining me for T.E.A. Time. Until the next pot.