The Ticket from March

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, where two men dressed leather for the same saddlers, and only one had seen the bottom of his own order spike.

Two curriers in one town, the same hides and the same tan pits.
Both spiked every order beside the door on the day it came in.
Both worked long and hard, and neither man was ever idle.
One spike carried tickets two years old, the other never held a dozen.
The heavy work of the town went to one of them and the apologies to the other.
Which, and what did he do on the first Monday of every month?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two curriers, in a town I have never named. The same tanner, the same terms, the same shaving knife worn to a crescent, and each with a spike beside the door where an order went up on a slip of card the day it came in.

The first was the better currier. His blacked calf had a shine the bootmakers in the lower street could pick out across a counter. He was the more obliging man too, and said yes to everything, and his spike was the thickest in the trade. Each morning he read the three or four tickets on top and took whichever somebody had asked about most recently.

Further down than he had looked since the spring were these. A trial side of waxed calf for the new bootmaker two streets off, written in March, wanting a morning and a walk. The boarding of his drying loft, where the rain came in at the north end. A workbag in white leather for a lady who had the wrong man.

He read past all three for the best part of a year. Stopped in the street, he would have said he was behind with his work. He was not behind with his work. He was behind with three decisions, which is a different complaint and does not get better by working on a Sunday.

The bill came in where he was not watching. The bootmaker asked twice, got a civil answer twice, then bought his calf thirty miles up the line and took his repairs with him. The loft let in two wet weeks of October and a parcel of hides went to mould. And the lady told people he never had got round to it, which was true.

The second man was slower at the beam and knew it. What he had instead was the first Monday of the month, when he dressed no leather, took the spike to the bench and went through it from the bottom, oldest ticket first, letting nothing back on the nail without a mark on it. Four marks were allowed. A day and an hour written on the card, if the thing wanted nothing but time. A smaller first step, if it was too large for a day yet, and that step was usually a question: what the boards would cost, what the waterworks paid for pump buckets. His apprentice's initials, if the lad could do it with one showing. Or the ticket came off the spike and into the stove under the dubbin pot.

That last mark took the nerve, and he made it perhaps three times in ten. He burned the ticket for the splitting machine he had wanted three years and could not pay for, and the workbag, and wrote the lady four lines naming the man who did that work properly. The saddler who gave him the heavy contract two winters later explained himself by saying that when this man said a thing was coming, it came.

Be fair to the first man. He was no idler, and the finer tradesman, and a spike is honest furniture that happens to hide its own bottom.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

An item that has survived many readings of your list is not waiting to be done, it is waiting to be decided. That is precisely why it is still there. What it needs is not an hour at the bench, and an hour at the bench is the only thing you keep offering it.

A list holds two different animals under one heading. There are tasks, where the only thing missing is time, and time turns up on its own. And there are decisions, where what is missing is information, or money, or somebody else's agreement, or your own willingness to say no. Time does nothing whatever for the second kind. Write a decision down as though it were a task and you may carry it a year, because reading past a thing has the comfortable texture of intending it.

The carrying is charged in two places. A list you know to be two thirds dead is a list you stop believing, and the live entries drown in with the rest. And somebody is often still waiting: on the list is a note to yourself, but it was heard across the counter as a promise, and the other party keeps his end by going quietly elsewhere.

The fourth mark is seldom made because striking a thing out feels like confessing a failure, while carrying it forward feels like keeping faith. It is the other way about. Striking it is a decision arrived at late; the failure was the eleven months of telling yourself it was coming. The months already spent intending it are the worst argument for spending another, which is the business of the rent you have already paid. And a thing that does matter is not mended by being carried. It wants the hour nobody claims.

So take the currier's Monday. Once a month, at a set hour, work your list from the oldest entry upward, and let nothing go back without one of his four marks on it. Half of what looked like a backlog of work turns out to be refusals you were too polite to make.

Two cautions. The clearing out is no licence to strike whatever is uncomfortable. The price rise you have not announced, the word owed to a customer, the account you should have closed: those look strikeable and are load bearing. Ask whether the thing would still matter a year from now if it were never done, and if it would, it gets a date and not a line. And the fault is never the holder. Do not answer this letter by buying a cleverer system, a pleasure for a fortnight and then a longer list in a tidier hand. What does the work is the appointment and the mark.

Three questions, and the first can be answered before you put the lamp out:

1. What is the oldest thing on your list, and what is actually missing? Time, information, money or nerve. Only the first wants a free afternoon, and naming the others gives you the next step in a sentence.
2. How many entries have you carried forward more than three times? Count them off honestly. That number is the true size of your undecided list.
3. Which of them is somebody still waiting on? Those are not yours to strike in private. They are owed four lines today, with a date in them or the name of a better man for the job.

The Answer to the Riddle

The heavy work of the town went to one of them and the apologies to the other. Which, and what did he do on the first Monday of every month?

The man with the short spike, who was the slower currier. He worked his orders from the bottom upward and gave each old ticket a day, a smaller first step, another man's name, or the stove. He was trusted with the heavy work because every promise he carried was one he had looked at that month.

The verse:

The ticket you read and then put back
Is not short of an hour or two.
It is short of a yes or a no from you,
And the spike will not give you either.

Until next time. Go and take the three oldest things off your list and give each one a date, a smaller first step, or a line through it.

P.S. Note what the new century has done to the spike. Your list now lives in a machine that holds ten thousand entries without complaint and will not show you its bottom unless you ask. The currier at least had the weight of the thing to warn him. You have none, so name the Monday.

Also in the archive: The Shutter at Seven, Settled in February and Five Months and Two Days.