I couldn’t understand what I was seeing.
It was just . . . befuddling.
I mean, where did he think he was?
At a goddamned picnic?
Or a tractor pull?
Is that how people ate at tractor pulls?
Are those still a thing?
I don’t know.
I’ve never been to one.
But the cliché seems appropriate here.
This was a restaurant.
Yes, a casual one.
In small-town, rural Missouri.
I certainly hadn’t expected white ties and tails.
But this . . .
I was in town for work, due to visit a factory the following morning.
I had pretty low expectations for dinner.
This was not an area known for fine dining.
Or anything remotely healthy.
I’d scanned the menus of a half dozen restaurants online and found one that had at least a couple items that weren’t deep-fried and covered in melted cheese.
Which were rarities in this part of the country.
Even a salad there was so loaded down with bright-orange, straight-from-the-bag cheddar cheese, bacon bits, thick-as-mayonnaise ranch dressing, and gumball-size croutons a person risked bypass surgery even while confining himself to such “lighter” options.
The people in the restaurant seemed unconcerned.
The group at the table next to me ordered two rounds each of jalapeno poppers and onion rings before moving on to cheeseburgers and overloaded plates of alfredo.
I was by myself, in my usual state of semi-boredom, and took notice of these things.
A couple walked into the restaurant about ten minutes later and took the table right in front of mine.
The gentleman appeared to be in his mid-sixties with closely cropped hair.
He wore a pair of jeans and a quarter-zip sweater over a button-down oxford.
The woman who accompanied him was petite, of Asian descent, and tastefully dressed.
They chatted quietly until the waiter came over to take their order.
I noticed the gentleman was seated a couple feet back from the table, legs and arms casually crossed.
A few minutes later, two salads and a basket of breadsticks arrived at their table.
The woman started in on her salad, eating daintily, one lettuce leaf at a time.
And the guy . . .
He remained seated some distance from the table while he leaned forward and propped his phone up against his wallet a couple inches from the table’s edge.
He scrolled around on his phone until he found what appeared to be a live feed from ESPN.
The guy then picked up his salad plate, and, with his chair still pushed back and legs still crossed, leaned back, held the plate up to his mouth, and started shoveling in the salad.
While he did so, he completely ignored his wife and focused intently on SportsCenter.
Which didn’t seem to bother her in the least.
It was one of the most bizarre scenes I’d witnessed in any restaurant, ever.
It couldn’t go on like that for long, I thought.
I mean, the guy would eventually come to his senses, put his plate on the table, shut off his goddamned phone, and eat like a human-fucking-being, right?
Wrong.
He eventually gestured to his wife to pass him the basket of breadsticks.
She did so, while he sat his empty salad plate on the table.
And then he held the basket under his chin while he shoved down two breadsticks, still pushed back some distance from the table.
How could anyone with even an ounce of self-awareness eat like that?
How does one come to have such colossally poor manners?
Had he never learned?
Or did he just not care?
Had he experienced some form of trauma that had led him to regress to a Freudian, infantile state?
Shit, I’d seen toddlers in highchairs better able to comport themselves in public than this guy.
Whatever the case, I wanted to understand him.
And then I wanted to punch him.
Why?
Because manners matter.
They’re an indicator as to whether a person should be taken seriously.
Or as an idiot, like the guy in this restaurant.
Good manners should not be misunderstood as something reserved for stuffy elites.
They’re not about extending one’s pinky while lifting a teacup from a saucer.
Employed correctly, good manners put people at ease.
They evidence respect for one’s surroundings, the occasion, and the company in which a person finds himself.
A practitioner of good etiquette has a certain it factor.
You can’t always explain it.
All you know is that when you’re around that person, you want to be a better version of yourself.
I have a powerful memory from my formative years.
As a young Navy petty officer, I was invited to a black-tie dinner on base.
I hadn’t the first clue as to how to behave at such an event, so I figured I’d take my cues from the officers in attendance.
I’d come to enjoy the officers in my squadron.
They were all pilots, which I desperately wanted to be, and they treated me like a little brother.
The dinner kicked off with an open bar, of course.
And, before long, in fine Naval Aviation tradition, the officers from my squadron were discarding portions of their uniforms and flinging rolls at each other.
It went downhill from there.
In contrast, seated at the opposite end of the ballroom, was the captain in charge of the base’s Marine Corps detachment.
Even as the night progressed and the scene at my squadron’s table deteriorated, the captain remained a vision of composure.
I watched how he ate.
How he conversed with others at his table.
How he escorted his wife to and from the dance floor.
How he presented himself to the base commanding officer.
And how he graciously took leave the moment before things got really out of hand.
He was pure class.
And I remember thinking how incredible it must be to work for that officer.
Without even knowing him, I instinctively wanted to follow him.
As a Navy guy, do you know how hard it is for me to say that about a Marine?
But it was the damn truth.
The captain’s impeccable manners were his calling card.
In a good way.
The converse can also be true.
I have a buddy who partnered with a guy he barely knew on what turned out to be a reasonably successful business venture.
It probably could have been even more successful had the guy not turned out to be a complete sociopath.
My buddy recalled the dinner at which he first met him.
The guy ordered a steak, which he proceeded to eat with his hands.
“That should have been a red flag,” my friend had said.
A messy break between the two eventually ensued, complete with threats, temper tantrums, lawyers, and an untold amount of destroyed value.
The steak should have indeed been a red flag.
Speaking from my own experience, I know a guy who is a complete bully-narcissist, who thinks nothing of interrupting, belittling, and backstabbing—on a good day.
And that should have come as no surprise following the dinner at which I sat next to him early in our acquaintance.
He, too, was fond of eating with his hands, as well as licking his fingers, slurping, belching, reaching, and speaking with his mouth full, even before others at the table had received their food and taken a single bite.
In a word, he’s disgusting.
At the risk of sounding like Judge Smails at Bushwood, chastising Rodney Dangerfield’s character, “You! You! You’re no gentleman!” allow me to repeat myself.
Manners matter.
So, please, people,
Elbows off the table.
Hands off the food.
No speaking with your mouth full.
Be thoughtful of others.
And put your goddamned phone away.
Ann Landers and I
Will thank you.