Al Batt’s columns appear every Wednesday and Sunday.

Even birds perched on utility wires waited in line.

I walked the state fairgrounds on the way to my job and encountered a long line snaking to one of the buildings. I couldn’t see the front of the line, so I asked the man at the end of the queue nearest me what he stood in line for. He told me that he didn’t know, but figured it must be for something amazingly good or the line wouldn’t have been so long.

Not long ago, I was sitting in my car, stalled in unmoving traffic. I had chosen the road most traveled. A line of cars had captured me. I sat stock-still long enough to make a saint consider swearing. Everyone was going to be late for something. It was a line of broken dreams, and no one owned the franchise. A fellow in a car next to me went loco. There is always a sorehead somewhere in such a line who bangs on his steering wheel with his fists. Too much coffee, I suppose. Cars should be equipped with heated seats that provide restroom facilities. I daydreamed for a bit and then looked at a house not from the highway and mused that if I lived there, I’d have been home by then.

I should be used to waiting in line. I’ve been to amusement parks. I once waited in line for 45 minutes for food that wasn’t worth a 4 or 5-minute wait.

My brother told me that once he got out of the Army, he vowed that he’d never wait in another line.

A friend said that he and his wife were cutting back. Making do with less. They are beginning by eliminating waiting in lines.

“Where do you want to go?” I heard a woman ask a significant other.

“Wherever you’d like to go, as long as we don’t have to wait in line,” was his reply.

I rushed into the store to pick up a couple of things. The 12 items or less had a good number of shoppers waiting, so I headed to a regular checkout lane. I often pick the wrong lane. I go for the shortest, which isn’t always the fastest. Someone ahead of me had many coupons, some expired, and an item that required an employee to run to a shelf for a price check.

We grumble that there should be a line for people who don’t like waiting in line. Waiting in line is like a game of whack-a-mole. We get hit with a hammer whenever we look ahead to check on the progress. The saving grace, if it could be called that, of waiting in a line is that we tend to overestimate the amount of time we spend waiting in line. It seems longer than it really is.

We hurry. We wait. We even wait in a hurry. Our impatience manifests itself in furtive glances at wristwatches (remember those things), checking the time on our cellphones or looking at, for those who carry them, grandfather clocks.

Need or want can be a fine line or a long line. We appreciate diversions.

I remember waiting in a long line, leaning on my shopping cart in a busy supermarket, when a frazzled young mother with a bunch of rambunctious kids rammed her cart into an older fellow’s knee. He winced. She apologized. He smiled and said, “It’s OK. This is the first time in days that something took my mind off my toothache.”

I appreciated his good humor.

What’s the worst-case scenario of waiting in a line? It’s that you will never get out of that line. It reminds me of the people who call the fire department to get their cats out of trees. I’ve never seen a single cat skeleton in a tree or a skeleton standing in line in a store any time other than on Halloween. We move to the head of the line and are freed eventually.

My mother told me that I should never cut ahead of anyone in line. If I did, no one would like me. That is the long-lost Eleventh Commandment.

I don’t mind waiting. It could be worse. I occupy myself with good activities. I’m a chronic taker of notes. I carry a pen and a notebook. I jot things down while waiting.

I work at being a better person. There is much work to be done.

And I forgive everyone for being ahead of me in line, especially those with expired coupons.