Episode summary
Saturday church cleaning moves to the evening so the family can reach the San Antonio Zoo. Two phrases for a chore you still mean to do, and for a first visit that still counts.
T.E.A. Time is hosted by English teacher Tayvin Bayless. Read the full transcript.
Hello, hello, and welcome to T.E.A. Time with Tayvin Bayless.
Whether this is your first cup with me or you’ve been sipping along for a while, glad to have you here.
Do you ever have something on your to-do list that you fully intend to finish, just not right now? Something you’ll get to later today, once something better happens first? I had one of those this weekend.
Every Saturday, I teach from five in the morning until nine. On a normal Saturday, right after that last lesson, I head over to the church and clean my part of the building. This Saturday was not normal. We had a zoo trip planned, and we wanted to be on the road by around eleven, so I didn’t really want to fit cleaning in where it usually goes. I didn’t skip it. I didn’t forget about it. I just moved it.
The phrase is: put off. Put off.
In English, when you put something off, you decide it’ll happen later instead of right now. It’s still on your list. It’s just not first anymore.
And that’s an important difference, because putting something off isn’t the same as canceling it, and it isn’t the same as forgetting it. If I’d canceled the cleaning, it wouldn’t have happened. If I’d forgotten it, it might not have happened unless someone, probably Emma, reminded me. Neither of those is what happened. I still got the cleaning that I’ve committed to do finished. It just happened after all of the fun we had planned.
You’ve probably done this before, I’m sure. Maybe someone sends you a message, and you know you should answer it, but you put it off until after dinner. Same idea. The task doesn’t disappear. It just waits its turn.
So on Saturday, I put off my usual cleaning time so we could get on the road a bit quicker. That gave me a short window after teaching to get a couple of other things done, like take a shower since I hadn’t had the chance to do that yet. I also had a few things I wanted to get ready to send out to some of my students. While I was doing that, Emma was packing the cooler and Eliana was napping in preparation for a long and fun day. By about eleven thirty we were at my mom’s place, picking her up.
We live in San Marcos, Texas, which is pretty much directly between Austin and San Antonio. I tell people it takes about an hour to get to downtown Austin, and about an hour to get to downtown San Antonio. I say “about” on purpose. On a good day, with light traffic, it might be forty minutes. On a bad day, if something big is happening, it can take an hour and twenty minutes, or even up to two hours. You don’t really know until you’ve hit the road. Luckily, traffic headed to the zoo was actually great. We made it in forty-five minutes and pulled in about half past noon.
The zoo doesn’t let you bring food inside, because they sell food there. I practically never buy food from places like this: amusement parks, zoos, aquariums, and such. The prices are outrageous, meaning much higher than the same meal would cost anywhere else. Emma and my mom had already packed lunch in a cooler, so we ate in the car before we went in. A few hours later we came back to that same cooler and ate again before the drive home to San Marcos.
The best thing in that cooler used an ingredient we got on an outing a couple of weeks earlier. There’s a place in a nearby town called Fickle Pickle, and pickles are pretty much the only thing they sell. Not a wall of different pickles. One recipe. You get two choices: the original, or the original with a little bit of spice. They’ve been in business for over thirty years, if I’m remembering that right, which tells you something. These are, by far, the best pickles I’ve ever had. We’d gone with my mom, bought a jar, and we’d been using them a little at a time since then. Emma made a tuna salad with those pickles and the pickle juice, and we ate it on crackers in the parking lot. There were also vegetables, hummus, fruit, and some drinks. All of that was good. The tuna salad was the showstopper.
Eliana is still quite young. She’s not at an age where she can really understand the different animals she’s looking at. I think she had some fun anyway. It was hot, so we pushed her in a shaded stroller most of the time. When we found indoor kids’ areas, we let her out and she ran around and played.
We still saw a lot. Giraffes. Ostriches. Dozens of other exotic birds, meaning birds you don’t see in a Texas backyard. Lemurs, monkeys, crocodiles, snakes. The crocodiles really shocked me. They were as still as statues. I wasn’t convinced they were real until I saw one blink. I stood there for at least a minute, watching, before I caught any small sign of movement. Pretty terrifying. Standing on the dry side of the glass, I could see exactly how an animal like that would be a dangerous predator in the water, waiting practically invisible for its stillness.
My favorite had to be the gorillas. The exhibit is relatively new at the San Antonio Zoo. I’d pictured maybe two or three animals. I counted at least seven. They have a massive enclosure that seemed to span multiple buildings, with these suspended tunnels, tunnels hung up above the ground, so the gorillas can climb through and get from one area to another. I was happy to see that they had that much space. All four of us were watching together when one silverback, a big adult male with that silver hair across his back, walked up close. He pressed his nose right against the glass and stared at us for a moment. Then he turned around and sat down with a backward flick of his hands against the glass. If you’ve ever seen a video of a concert pianist with long coattails, they need to adjust those coattails with a backward flick of their wrists to ensure they are falling past the bench. The gorilla looked just like that when he sat down.
Emma had already gone to this zoo with Eliana a couple of times, including with a friend of ours from church and that friend’s daughters. This was my first time. I really enjoyed it. I don’t know if Emma, Eliana, and I will make it back together before we move. Emma and my mom have a year-long pass, so they can come back without buying another ticket, and I’m sure they’ll get at least one more visit in.
At four o’clock the zoo ran a fall and Halloween trick-or-treating activity for kids. It’s still September, so there’s a good amount of time before Halloween, but from what I understand they’re going to keep doing this regularly until then. They’d set up a few booths. Each booth was painted with a different animal, and each one had a door you were supposed to knock on. Behind the doors, zoo workers stood with giant buckets of candy. They’d grab a few pieces and drop them in the kids’ bags. We all walked Eliana from door to door. We couldn’t get her to knock consistently, but what she loved was the shutting. A worker would open the door, hand her candy, and then she’d swing that door closed like it was her favorite game.
We got home around six. I finished up some work on my computer, then headed over to the church. My portion of the cleaning usually takes about an hour, and that night was the same. The building needed to be ready for our worship service the next day. So, this Saturday was a bit different from our regular routine. It was hot. I was sweaty, and my feet were a bit sore by the end of it. Overall, though, it was a great Saturday. Walking around with Emma, Eliana, and my mom, eating tuna salad in the parking lot, watching a gorilla with aspirations of being a world-renowned pianist: that’s the kind of day I want more of. It made me want to find some other places to go and sights to see between San Antonio and Austin over the next few months. I hope we can make some more memories before we leave Texas and move on to potentially greener pastures.
So there it is. Emma had already taken Eliana to that zoo more than once. This was my first time. I was late to something my own family had already been enjoying.
There’s a phrase for that: better late than never.
In English, we say better late than never when a good thing still counts, even if it shows up after everyone else already has had it. The timing might not be perfect, but the experience still matters.
You know how it goes. A friend recommends a restaurant for two years, and you finally try it. Or someone’s been raving about a show for a while, and you finally sit down and watch the first episode. Better late than never doesn’t come with an apology attached. More like: I took a while, but I’m here now.
Put off is about rescheduling a task. I moved the cleaning so we could go. Better late than never is about finally experiencing it, or finally getting it done.
So is there a place your people have already been going without you, or something you’ve been meaning to catch up on? There’s no deadline here. Whenever you get there is a perfectly fine time to get there.
And with that, my cup is empty. Thanks for joining me for T.E.A. Time. Until the next pot.
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