In a local steak house rest room, I heard a loud man supervising three toddlers. He bellowed, "Don't sit on that seat, some dirty M—F--ng C—S--ker from Iraq prob'ly just sat there." I felt a tightness in my chest and stomach, and didn’t relish the thought of encountering this guy.
When I emerged from my stall, he was giving them similar input on washing their hands. One of the three kids was a girl, who just looked at him wide-eyed, as if her head were a blank slate he’d just covered with scrawls.
I found myself face to chest with him (he was taller than me) and was surprised when he said, "and how are you this evening, Sir?" He even pasted a big beaming smile on his face.
He looked to be in his late twenties. He was dressed in a white sleeveless T-shirt, and his muscles and tattoos looked he’d acquired them in jail. He also wore painters' pants and white sneakers with long streams of toilet paper stuffed into them, trailing on the floor behind him. I got the feeling that his smile and elaborately polite hello were also somehow for the "benefit of" the children.
I figured saying anything “corrective” to him would have just provoked hostility. I smiled back, answered his question with one word, “OK,” and got out of there.
I had mixed feelings about not saying what I thought. And, speaking of thought, I wondered what the hell the mother of those children could have been thinking.
-- 2009 by Jack Veasey
