Is It Time Yet?

Oh the need to move, hurry, alter, change the pace of time ..how human, childlike. Do we ever really master that impatience?
When I was a wee girl, not quite 4, my beloved Daddy decided to try his businessman's awkward hand at a garden..He selected his favorites, and many of them...radishes (delicious with salt), peas, peppers, green beans and celery, lettuce too. Carrots, he was like Elmer Fudd about them, but I don't want to rush ahead...
I ate lollipops and watched him dig and sweat and get eaten alive by gnats and bees and mosquitos...My daddy always wore a suit a tie and a fedora hat in public...I wasn't sure who he had become, so I watched from the back steps......every day he dug and spaded the dirt.
He ardently, and without any prior experience or background in tilling the land, or doing much of anything hands on, tackled our rocky, non-garden prepped, rented home's backyard in Nutley NJ...he really worked hard..my mother used to holler "Will you PLEASE take a break, you're going to have a heart attack"...she would send me to that back garden with water or a beer for him, but I was afraid of the bees and the yappy dog, so as much as I loved my Daddy I would run back to the steps....
Well, finally the garden was planted...little sticks with seed packets were every where, and then it began...the Is It Time Yet? phase...
I'm sure my Daddy's dreams of his garden yield were grand...he'd come home each day off the bus, newspaper under his arm, hat and suit on, and rush to his garden...he watered and nurtured that dusty seed- packet- covered patch like a godfather....every day, I would go with him while we looked for little green things to stick up...and Lo..they came!!! My Daddy the farmer...could I love him more???
Every day, water, hope, inspect, chase off rabbits...even position that ferociously wild dog near the garden to scare critters away....little beans, little things began to grow......rabbits ate the lettuce... No matter, his eyes were on the radishes and carrots....Daddy, is it Time yet??
And soon enough we had a new routine, me and my Daddy...go to the garden...pull up the radishes and carrots and check out how big they were...and jam them back into the dirt to get bigger...he would tell me...Honey, just a little more Time........
But it never came...and neither did the carrots or radishes....and we gave up....he told me it must have been the lousy soil in Nutley...later I realized that Martha Stewart was growing up in a house just a few steps from where we lived....gosh, Daddy....maybe it wasn't the soil at all....it just wasn' t Time........