Picky, picky. Toenails, teeth, plastic lids...
Pssst! You’re in public, not home alone
By NEIL STEINBERG nsteinberg@suntimes.com Apr 28, 2011 06:05PM
“That must be really good.â€
I could claim the comment just slipped out.
But it didn’t. I sat there, on the 7:54 a.m. Metra train into the city for a long while, watching the lady in front of me lick the square red plastic lid from a food container.
It wasn’t a quick, clandestine lick either, but a thorough, methodical, inch by inch going over of the entire surface. She was like a cat scouring a can of tuna. A hungry cat. As if she were painting the lid with her tongue.
Long ago I gave up the notion of trying to reprimand strangers in public. That ship has sailed. I can’t tell if society has become more lax — I’m reluctant to say that, since every pundit since Juvenal has echoed the thought — or I’m getting old and tired of the struggle.
Just last week, a young man sat on the train, shoes off, picking at his bare feet.
Ten years ago, I would have blurted out, “God, that’s disgusting!†And I almost said it now, after weighing that comment versus the less confrontational, “You do realize you’re out in public, don’t you?â€
But it was the start of the train ride. I’d have to sit for the next 40 minutes in the sulfurous fallout of whatever ugly exchange ensued between us. A public self-podiatrist is not looking for external guidance. No one else seemed to care. It was easier for me to look out the window and forget about it, or try to. (These things tend to lodge in the mind — I still remember the woman who liked to floss on the 151 bus, and that was in the mid-1990s).
Perhaps this is the Path of the Coward.
I could turn this into an elegy for public manners, how women once wore white gloves and men wore spotless fedoras and if your shoes weren’t shined people would hiss at you in the street. Sydney J. Harris once wrote a column upbraiding his fellow passengers on a long airplane flight for loosening their ties and taking off their jackets.
Getting too old to fight it any more
