Canice Santos
Oct., 1, 2001
Terciera, Azores, Portugal (restaurant)
“[not] behind the 8-ball”
We were in Praia da Vittoria in the Azores and the hotel owner was late, slow in setting up breakfast and we had a ferry to catch on the other side of the island. MyAunt Canice impatiently said, “she’ not behind the 8-ball.” I asked her how else the saying could be used and what it meant. She said it could mean, “you’re late, you’re slow, or you haven’t met your tasks. It could also mean that you’re unsuccessfully trying to meet a deadline.”
I asked her where she first heard it. She said, “I was seventeen or eighteen, working at EBSCO Industries on 515 Marked Street in San Francisco. The 8-ball is from billiards. It was my first job, I was a ditto [machine] operator. It was 1956-57. EBSCO was a military mail order club. Toddy (Canice’s sister, my aunt, and her husband), John, and your mother, Maureen all worked there.”
I’ve heard my aunt Canice use this expression most of my life. She used it a lot when she was a waitress and I was a salad girl at the Rancho Nicasio restaurant (Canice got me my first job). I was 16, it was the year Man walked on the Moon. For some reason, I associate 8-ball with that Rancho Nicasio. I remember all of us sitting at the bar watching that first giant step for mankind on TV—and we were all on company time too. Normally they were a skinflint organization. Since it was a bar, there was craps and dice, maybe even a pool table. And when playing pool, you don’t want to sink the 8-ball before you’ve sunk all your other balls. There’s a definite, progressional order to things. I thing the message is to finish first things first, and on time, and you won’t foul up or run out of time later.
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