On this mainly sunny Friday afternoon, July 24th, 2009, at precisely 12:14pm and 28 seconds, there were a lot of unusual things on Cecil’s list of things-to-do. Not unusual in the sense of being strange, but unusual in the sense that they just weren’t usually there. Today his list included such things as “8:52am - check suitcases” and “9:04am - get on the bus” and “10:32am - get off the bus”, whereas a typical day would include much more mundane items such as “7:04am - wake up” and “7:12am - eat porridge”.

    One of the things that was definitely not on his list today, or any other day, was “12:15pm - get eaten by a tiger”. Unfortunately this appeared to be what was about to happen right now, regardless of the plan on paper. Sitting with his back pressed up against a tree, wondering how the whole agenda had gone so terribly awry, he stared into the cold eyes of this giant killer feline. The tigers mouth watered at the thought of some delicious human meat for a change. It was feeding time for the tiger, which one should note carefully is a very bad time to get between a hungry tiger and his food. However, this is precisely what Cecil had managed to do. So the tiger was thinking about eating Cecil instead. The only thing Cecil was thinking was “Great, now I’m fifteen minutes behind schedule. This is all Edna’s fault.”

    Exactly 83 years, 19 days, 6 hours, and 23 and a half minutes earlier, Cecil’s parents gave birth to him. He came out exactly 9 months to the second after being conceived. It didn’t take his parents very long to realize he was a slightly abnormal child. For example, he woke up at exactly 7:04am every morning. Exactly 8 minutes later at 7:12am he would start to cry for food. His diaper needed to be changed exactly 14 minutes after that. He would fall asleep for his afternoon nap exactly 27 minutes after his 12:03pm feeding, and wake up in exactly 89 minutes. This sort of impeccable timing went on throughout the day, at exactly the same times every day, without fail. It got to be that little Cecil was more reliable than the old grandfather clock in the living room, which his parents regularly forgot to wind. Eventually his father just removed the chimes from the clock to avoid conflict.

    When he was six months old, Cecil’s parents discovered the consequences of failing to adhere to his schedule. One evening, caught up in a particularly good section of a particularly good book, his mother neglected to feed him right on time. Rather than continuing to cry for food though, he stopped crying at exactly the time he normally ate. When his mother arrived, fully ten minutes late, he was sitting in his crib staring fixedly at nothing. He stayed this way, not reacting to anything she did. When she picked him up, he just hung there limp. On the telephone, the doctor said to leave him be for the night, so long as he was still breathing, and if he was still like that in the morning he’d come by to check on him. Cecil’s mother thought this slightly less than prudent, but he was the only doctor in town. She finally came to grips with the probability that he wouldn’t starve to death in one evening, and went to sleep. She was awakened the next morning at precisely 7:12am by Cecil’s cries, and rushed in to feed him. He seemed perfectly normal that morning, or at least as normal as a baby like Cecil could be, and he continued to stay normal as long as his parents stuck to his schedule.

    When he was 3, Cecil’s parents bought him a clock for Christmas with a picture of a tiger on it. After two weeks of having to unscrew the cover twice every day to readjust the second hand, Cecil smashed it to bits with a hammer. It was the last clock he ever owned. His brain kept time better. There was some trouble later in grade four when a ceremony for the presentation of the Most Punctual Student Award, which Cecil won every single year, started two minutes behind schedule.

    After high school, Cecil worked at the railway station keeping the trains on time. He was very good at it. If he’d grown up in Russia, Stalin would have been his role model. But only with respect to the trains, of course. Cecil met Edna at a local coffee shop, which they both went to at exactly the same time every day before work. Edna was the supervisor at the airport’s air-traffic control tower. She’d been promoted to this position after winning the Best Employee award four years in a row. If there was one thing Edna could do very well, it was making sure things happened on time. Both of them had been going to this coffee shop for years, and Cecil had always known her as a regular, but he’d never had the time to talk to her. But one fateful winter day his coffee was not as hot as usual, and he finished it a full 42 seconds ahead of schedule. So he walked over to her table and introduced himself.
    ”Hello miss. I’m Cecil. Mind if I sit down?”
    ”Please do.” So Cecil sat down.
    ”Lovely weather today, isn’t it?” she asked him.
    ”Yes, I suppose it must be. ” he replied. Then he looked at his watch. “Well, it’s time I must be off!” he said, and stood up again.
    ”Me too. See you later!” and they headed off to their workplaces.
    It took two years at this rate, but eventually they were drinking their coffee together before work each morning. And eventually they started scheduling dates, which neither of them was ever late for. And eventually they got married. It was probably the first wedding in all of history to start exactly on time.

    It was only last month, on the 50th anniversary of their wedding, that Edna told Cecil she thought he might need some sort of vacation.
    ”Vacation? From what?” he inquired. “I’ve been retired from work for 18 years! And I’m far too old for a vacation.”
    ”You’re too old not to have one.” she retorted. “I mean, don’t you ever want to do anything different? Isn’t there something you’ve always wanted to do, but never had the time?”
    ”What on earth do you mean? Everything always happens on time.”
    ”Yes, yes, but… aren’t there any things you’re interested in that you still haven’t gotten around to?” questioned Edna. “So much of your time is spent sitting on that couch watching your regularly scheduled programs on the television, or reading the same books again. There must be something different to do!” Cecil pondered this for some time. He always scheduled time for pondering, though it rarely went anywhere interesting.
    ”Well,” he finally surmised, “I’ve always been interested in jungle animals. Especially the ones who’s schedules are backwards from ours. You know, like the, what’s it called, nocturnal ones. Maybe I’d enjoy a trip to the jungle.”

    So Cecil called the travel agent. He nearly aborted the whole plan right then when the agent neglected to book a specific appointment time, but said Cecil could drop by his office “whenever he felt like it”. They worked it out eventually though. Cecil got his vaccinations, packed his suitcase, and created a carefully planned agenda. When the day came, Edna walked him to the bus stop. To his relief the bus arrived exactly on schedule. Buses are often problematic to people who like doing things on time, so he usually avoided them. They said their farewells and hugged goodbye. One hour and 28 minutes later, he got off the bus at the African Lion Safari, and proceeded immediately to the information booth for a copy of the day’s itinerary.

    Only eight minutes in, Cecil was already beginning to have misgivings about the trip. The driver of the Jeep, a boy only eighteen years old, was four minutes and twenty seconds behind schedule.
    ”We were late getting back from the last trip. Then I had my union mandated 15 minute break, ya know?” was the driver’s excuse. He smelled a bit odd, but Cecil hadn’t hung around with the right crowds in the sixties to recognize the smell. The back seat of the Jeep was occupied by a rugged looking middle aged man and his two noisy kids, a girl and a boy.
    ”I’m an emergency oil rig mechanic,” the man explained. “If something breaks, they call me in, night or day. Never know when I’ll have to rush off. Very exciting stuff!” This nearly blew Cecil’s mind right out.

    An hour and fifteen minutes into the tour, just past the monkeys, Cecil was starting to get even more nervous. The jeep was stopped. It had been stopped for much longer than scheduled.
    ”Look daddy, tigers!” exclaimed the little girl.
    ”That’s nice dear” he replied.
    ”Do they eat people?” wondered the little boy.
    ”I doubt it. They keep them well fed here.” his dad assured him. The driver, who had been out of the jeep for what seemed like far too long, finally returned. He smelled a bit odd again.
    ”Well, we’re not going anywhere real quick” he said. “Looks like some damned monkeys ripped something important off the Jeep when we stopped back there.”
    Cecil felt panic creeping in. Unless things got fixed real quick, he was going to be late for lunch. He pleaded with the driver to do something, but the driver stubbornly refused.
    ”Look here. I’m getting minimum wage to drive this death trap, and I’m not risking my life for it.” he said. “Anyways, the park warden will be here soon with a mechanic. Don’t worry!” But worrying is exactly the thing Cecil was progressively doing more of.

    Lunchtime was scheduled for right now. But they were not in the cafeteria right now. This was a problem. Two minutes past lunchtime… things felt very wrong. With no food in it, the nerve endings in his stomach were sending the wrong signal to his brain, which had an internal timer more accurate than an atomic clock. Five minutes past… The neurons in his brain were so used to routine, they’d stopped working spontaneously a long time ago. They needed at least a week’s notice about any alteration to the regular schedule. Ten minutes past! Cecil’s brain was going crazy. He felt like one more minute off schedule would result in something actually physically exploding in there. 59 seconds later, Cecil could no longer cope with this.
    ”That’s it! I’m getting out and walking!” Cecil shouted.
    ”I’m not supposed to let you do that sir.” the driver warned him.
    ”And I’m supposed to be back for lunch already!” Cecil replied tersely, and he opened his door and got out. A different driver may have known how to deal with this properly, but they really hadn’t covered this sort of eventuality in the half hour training course he’d just taken this morning. So he turned on the radio instead.

    And that is how Cecil got to be stuck in between the hungry tiger and its food.

    The tiger was just thinking about pouncing, something which he hadn’t had opportunity to do in a real life situation since he was a cub, when the park warden’s Jeep screeched to a halt nearby. Out hopped the warden, rifle in hand. The tiger, with his simple brain, didn’t know much, but he did know that this particular human was one to be feared and respected. So he sat down and acted like he hadn’t been thinking of doing anything out of the ordinary.
    ”Hey old man!” the warden shouted at Cecil. “What the hell are you doing out here?”
    ”Trying to get to lunch on time.” answered Cecil. More like trying to be lunch, thought the warden, but he didn’t say it out loud because he knew it would sound incredibly silly.
    ”We can feed you lunch back at the station, mister.” the warden offered instead. “We’ve got lots of food back there.”
    ”Have you also got a time machine?” Cecil asked him. The warden was beginning to wonder if he’d misread the schedule, and the group from the nursing home’s Alzheimer’s ward was actually here today, not tomorrow.
    ”Why don’t you just get up, very slowly, and I do mean slowly, and come over here with me?” the warden suggested.
    ”I think it’s too late. I just don’t even know what to do anymore.” Cecil said sadly, and then, without provocation, he proceeded to explain to the warden the whole of his life.

    ”So that’s why I’m here, and that’s why this is the worse day of my life.” concluded Cecil some time later. The warden considered all this thoughtfully. Back in high school he’d been very interested in pursuing a career in psychiatry or psychology, but based on his negative behaviour towards his classmates, his guidance counselor had advised him that a career which involved shooting things might be more appropriate. He’d done a very brief stint as a national park ranger in some African jungle, but the native tribesmen had quickly shipped him back home, stating that they were more afraid of him than the deadly animals. Luckily this park had accepted him without even checking his references after the last warden was eaten by some mysteriously angry mountain goats. Now here he was, in a position to practice what he’d always dreamed of doing. First he sympathised with Cecil and his predicament. Then he helped Cecil explore the possible roots of his behaviour. Then he offered some alternatives available to living this way. Despite having no formal education in the field, his amateur psychiatry was about as effective as most professionals were. It took quite some time, during which a battle was going on in the tiger’s brain between the conditioned part of it that feared the warden and his tranquilizer gun, and the animal instinct part that wanted to eat Cecil for lunch. The odds were leaning heavily in favour of the instinctual part the further past lunchtime it got.

    Finally something snapped in Cecil’s brain, and he had what some might call an epiphany. He realized that his entire life had been rather dull and predictable, and that there must be more to it than that. If the clock in his head had gears, this would be the point where one of the springs popped out, and the gears jammed up, and the watch hands ground to a halt. Normally it would be the point where time stopped, except for Cecil time was just beginning. He resolved then and there that despite his age he was going to start living life spontaneously, and letting things happen as they may. Things were going to change. His remaining time on this planet was going to be full of surprises and adventure! He couldn’t wait to get home and tell Edna about this. Cecil had never been more happy in his life.
    ”You’re right!” exclaimed Cecil. “It’s about time I stopped being so boring. Life isn’t about being safe all the time. I don’t need schedules to tell me what to do every second of the day. I’m going to become spontaneous! I’m going to actually live!” And with that, he jumped up, let out a wild “Whooohooo!” and punched a very surprised tiger right in the nose.

    A gold brick path meanders through big white fluffy clouds. Peaceful harp music is playing in the background. Ahead stand giant gates made of gold, silver, and precious stones, behind which are some most impressive looking castles. The sun shines brilliantly. A heavily bearded man in luxurious blue robes is standing in front of the gates, holding open a book. It’s all exactly as Cecil has always pictured it. Well almost exactly. Instead of smiling at him, the man in the robes has a rather puzzled look on his face.

    ”Cecil?” he asked, looking at him very suspiciously.
    ”Yes.. that’s me.” Cecil replied. “And I assume you’re Saint Peter?”
    ”Yes…” The look on Saint Peter’s face continued to be one of puzzlement, which was slightly unnerving to Cecil.
    ”Is there some sort of problem?” Cecil asked him? “Am I not in the right place?”
    ”No no… you’re in the right place. Only… we weren’t expecting you for a few more months.”
    ”What? What do you mean?”
    ”Well you see… you’re not on the schedule yet.” Saint Peter explained. “I’m terribly sorry! This is very abnormal. But if you give me a moment I can go talk to The Boss and see what we can do.”
    ”Wait a second.” Cecil wondered something. “Are you saying that Heaven is on a tightly regimented schedule?”
    ”Oh of course!” replied Saint Peter. “To an infinitesimal degree. Every tiny event in the whole Universe has been on the schedule since the beginning of time itself! I can give you a copy of the daily itinerary if you’d like.”
    ”Hmmm…” pondered Cecil. After a moment’s thought he said “Well, if it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll go to the other place.”

    And Cecil wandered away, fully three months off schedule, and eventually, at some time or another he made it to the other place, which wasn’t nearly as bad as he’d expected. Oh certainly there was a lot of screaming and burning and gnashing of teeth, all that sort of thing. But Cecil was content, because none of it happened on any particular schedule.