It’s Tuesday morning, at the ungodly hour of 10:45. Instead of chillin’ in my Lay-Z-Boy, sippin’ my my java, as befits a man of leisure like me, I’m plotzed in the waiting room of The Kaiser of Cardiology hisself, Terrible Tony Tramontano.

People complain constantly about having to wait for doctor’s appointments. Then again, it seems a disease, if not a pandemic, in This Great Land of Ours that people complain about waiting for anything: Doctor’s appointments, car appointments, meals, store clerks, email replies — damn near everything. But I’m not one of them.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m hardly an evolved and enlightened soul about to show the Dalai Lama what’s what. I’ve easily got as many character defects as the next fool, if not more. But impatience isn’t one of them.

Why is that? I don’t know.

I do know that as a kid I was a creature of instant gratification and when it came to waiting for anything, I was a total pain in the prat. But over the years that changed. As a serious hitchhiker, patience is not just a virtue, it’s the sine qua non. And if you can’t stand around waiting, sometimes for hours, then trying to thumb your freewheeling way over The Asphalt Ribbon ain’t for you. Take the Greyhound instead, loser.

The Navy was another great classroom for mastering the fine art of waiting, and it started right from the get-go: Lose your cool in boot camp and paybacks would rain upon you before you could say John Paul Jones. And after you got out of boot camp, it wasn’t all loosey-goosey either.

Finally, as an English composition teacher I spent tens of thousands of hours doing nothing but correcting papers. I got efficient at it, but still, on average it took me 20 minutes to correct a paper. So if I had 85 students and wanted to get the papers returned in a week, that was almost 30 hours outside of class I spent poring over, “The World’s Worst Neighbor,” “Spot, the Wonder Dog,” “How Not To Steal a Car,” and the like. After 40 years of that, I may not have become a saint, but I sure acquired the patience of one.

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Gimme…and gimme now!

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But I think impatience has become a hallmark of our times. We live in a world of Instant Everything.

People whinge about their computer or cell phone being slow. Sixty years ago, either one of those gadgets — even a very slow one — would’ve been considered a sci-fi miracle-come-true.

You want to buy something you can’t find in town? No sweat, Bubba. Either order it online or by phone and a couple days later it’s on your doorstep. In the good old days, you first had to find the catalog that sold it. Then you sent in the order form, along with your check or money order. And maybe a couple weeks later it showed up. We were delighted when it did, the wait and anticipation having been fun, of and by themselves.

We wrote letters by hand and had to wait a good while for their reply. We used hand tools, cooked food from scratch. In My Home Town we could get two TV channels on our now-ridiculously-small black and white set. If we didn’t like what was on one channel, we had one alternative. And if we didn’t like what was on that one, tough noogs.

And speaking of TV: Believe it or not, once we turned on one of those ancient behemoths, we had to wait at least a minute for the tubes to warm up enough before a picture filled the screen. Did we get annoyed? Of course not, because it was just bizness as usual.

Similarly, cars didn’t fire up with the first twist of the key, and in really cold weather they didn’t start at all, no matter how long we tried or how much we cursed. Also, with the bias ply tires on a really cold day, you had to drive a couple hundred yards before they warmed up enough to quit sounding and feeling like you were riding on four foundation blocks.

Simply put, back then life moved at a slower pace and waiting wasn’t a big deal so much as a fact of life. Going along with that, we used to shmooze with peeps in the course of our everyday activities. If I ran into someone I knew downtown, say, on my way to a store, after we said our hellos, we almost always chatted a bit. Even in the process of buying some simple item like a candy bar, there was some sort of back-and-forth banter with the clerks. Matter of fact, it was expected; otherwise, you were considered a snob.

But no more. Now it seems almost everyone is in a hurry, but for what, I’ve no idea. Preparing their Nobel Prize acceptance speech? Visiting peeps in the old folks’ home? Finishing their latest craft project?

Going for a stroll in the woods? Who knows? All I know, is that type of old time shoot-the-breeze-over- nothing convo seems as far in the distant past as ice boxes and wood-fired cookstoves. And while folks have no time for idle chatter, they sure do have time for dozens of daily texts and social media and TV galore.

Hungry? Well, ya can’t wait either to get home and rustle up some grub or to sit in a cafe till your food is done. Uh-uh, you just hop in your whip and cruise in the drive-through where, in a flash, you can get a whole buncha greasy, oversalted swill. But no waiting. In fact, only thing you’ll have to wait for is the king-size bottle of Pepto that awaits when your guts flame up.

And speaking of drive-throughs: We’ve reached such a state of “Gotta Have It Now” that there are even drive-through calling hours. Yep, you read that right — drive-through calling hours (actually spelled drive- thru, as if it’d take too much time to write and read those extra letters). An article I found on US Funerals Online, which labels itself, “Your trusted guide to funeral planning,” sourced an article in the LA Times about this modern miracle.

To quote US Funerals Online (which bills itself as “Your trusted guide to funeral planning): “The ‘drive- thru” is something synonymous with convenience, allowing us to access goods and services, with minimal effort and deviation [Writer’s note: Deviation from what and about what was not clarified]…One home in the Greater Los Angeles area offers drive-thru viewings for its customers and community. The drive-thru involves a large glass window on the side of the funeral home,where the recently deceased can be laid out in all their grandeur, for all and sundry to view.

“Adams Mortuary in Compton introduced the glass-encased viewing chamber as a means to enable their community to view those they had lost en masse, and believed it was a step forward from the webcam view of a viewing.

“The viewing chamber is believed to be the only one of its kind in Southern California, Although similar chambers exist in Chicago and Louisiana.”

As a further sign of our times, it was noted that the glass in the viewing window is bulletproof, apparently to thwart any rascality from wannabe gunslingers cruising the neighborhood.

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The best gift of all

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But what about me waiting for Terrible Tony, MD, the thing that started this week’s rant?

Well, I didn’t have much of a wait, and I never do with him, because he schedules appointments well, and doesn’t overbook. Plus, since my last visit, he’s taken on a Physician’s Assistant, Jessica Shumway.

Much to my surprise, she, not TT, did my examination.

As I said, it was a surprise, but a welcome one. She was personable, thorough, and sharp as a tack. Plus, she was no pushover: Whenever she brought up one of my various lapses, in diet, exercise, regular BP readings, and those other minor annoyance, and I tried to joke my way out of it, she wrangled me back to the subject at hand (or perhaps more precisely, the subject at heart). And to her credit, she did it with perfect diplomacy.

After my appointment, I decided to top in his office and say hi to TT, hisself. After I apologized for waking him up, we chatted a bit, as we always do. Then I asked him why Jessica did my exam, not him.

He said, “I’m giving her all the patients I’m tired of dealing with.”

A long moment passed. Then, with his trademark smirk plastered on his mug, he continued.

“So you know what that means?” he said.

“Well,” I said, “I know what it means to me.”

“Yeah?” he said. “And what’s that?”

“It is,” I said, “This year, Christmas came early … and all’s right with the world.”