I have long been a student of sequences, probably because of my upbringing on a farm and, perhaps the larger influence, my association with my stepfather, Hank.... He was a city person, at one time the manager of a minor-league baseball team who had spent most of his life working in the grocery business. You would expect that someone in the grocery business would know about farming and sequences, but both forever remained a mystery to Hank.
What Hank seemed never to grasp was that on a farm you simply don’t go out and do a piece of work. No, the first thing you do is determine the lengthy sequence of activities necessary to even begin the job. Then you realize that the sequence of preparatory activities is so long you will never get to the intended task…
One day Hank said to me, “Pat, let’s take off the day and go fishing up Ruby Crick.”
“Sounds good to me,” I said. “Let’s go”
“Okay. But first we have to fix that hole in the pasture fence. Won’t take but twenty minutes.”
My shoulders sagged. “Hank,” I said. “Either we go fishing or we fix the fence. Which is it?”
“Both,” he said. “First we fix the fence, then we go fishing. Now go get the wire stretcher and we’ll get started.”
I saw that it was hopeless. No matter how often I had tried to explain sequences to Hank, he could never grasp their significance. “The wire stretcher’s broken.”
“Oh, that’s right. Well, we’ll just run over to the Haversteads and borrow theirs.”
“Yeah, but the Malloys borrowed our post-hole digger.”
“We can swing by the Malloys and pick up our post-hole digger on the way back from borrowing the Haversteads’ wire stretcher. Easy as pie.”
“We’re out of fence staples, too.”
“Is that right? I guess after we borrow the Haversteads’ wire stretcher and pick up our post-hole digger from the Malloys, we can zip into town and buy some staples at Jergans Hardware, come back, fix the fence, and go fishing.”
“But Hank, you promised Sam Jergans you would haul him in a load of hay bales from the Nelsons’ the next time you came to town.”
“Danged if that ain’t what I promised! I got to take Sam the hay when we go for the staples. Otherwise he’ll be mad as hops. We’ll have to take the truck, but first we better pick up the spare tire that’s over at LaRoy’s shop getting fixed. So here’s what we’ll do. We’ll borrow the wire stretcher from the Haversteads, pick up our wire stretcher from the Malloys, stop by LaRoy’s Shop and get the spare, go over to Nelson’s and load the hay, haul the hay in to Jergans, buy the staples, come home, fix the fence, and go fishing. How does that sound?”
“You’re getting mixed up, Hank. We borrow the wire stretcher from the Haversteads and pick up our post-hole digger from the Malloys.”
“Good leapin’ gosh a’mighty, this is getting complicated. Now where did we start? I better write it down in the proper...”
“Sequence,” I said. “We started out to go fishing, but first you wanted to fix that stupid hole in the fence.”
