It's not polite to stare, but sometimes....

There are many times when your eyes lock onto something or someone and for all the power in the world you just can’t tear your eyes away. I know it is not polite to stare. I was taught that when I was a kid and pretty much adhere to what I was taught as a kid, but sometimes you just can’t help it. I seem to get so curious about things that I find myself not only staring, but then analyzing what I have just witnessed.

You can sometimes see this with rubber neckers on the highway when an accident has occurred and try as you may, you find your own eyes, almost on their on volition locking onto the scene as well. Of course, this behaviour isn’t reserved solely for the highway, there are many instances where you know you shouldn’t stare, but again, try as you may, your eyes zoom in for a second confirming look. This also happens when it comes to fashion sense. I don’t get in trouble too much anymore, now that I have the troika of fashion police living at home with me. I have had my alertness honed to the point that all I need is one quick glance cast in my general direction that will send me scurrying back in my room to change the offending outfit.

I know it is beyond me to reproach people about fashion and the manner of their dress. When I was younger, if I had a function to go to, the extent of my fashion sensibility was to make sure that I wore the cleanest jeans that I could find on the floor. These were hopefully the ones without 6 months of cigarette ash rubbed into the thigh. If it was a really formal affair I would have at least put a pile of books on those jeans to put a nice crease down the front of the leg. Nothing but the best was my motto. But I was at one of those big box stores the other day and I found myself in wonder as I watched people drifting by in what appeared to be their pajamas. I looked for any signs proclaiming, “Pajama Bargain Days” or something, but there were none. I would have stood there forever with my jaw hanging down if it were not for a quick jab to the ribs from my wife and an admonishment not to stare.

Closer to home, we were eating supper the other night, just the four of us at the table now that my son is engaged and living away from home. We were having a late summer meal of corn-on-the-cob, nothing offside about that. I was just tucking into my cob when I looked around the table and saw my wife and youngest daughter nibbling away on their cobs after applying the required amount of butter, salt and pepper. Each of them proceeding down the length of the cob with their teeth moving in a rhythmic workmanlike fashion. But something struck me odd about our eldest daughter as she ate her cob. That was when I was locked into a stare. Something was not quite right in what I was staring at, but nothing seemed to register on me what it was. I felt like a character in a Stephen King novel. You know the character I am talking about. He is always the one who is staring at something intently just before the head explodes and a creature comes charging out of the blood spurting neck. I didn’t really expect that to happen, but I was preparing myself nonetheless. Then it struck me what was wrong. She was eating the corn off the cob in an entirely unacceptable manner. She wasn’t eating down the row of corn, she was eating around the cob, over the top. She stopped in mid bite when she sensed I was staring at her. “What?” She asked inquisitively. ”Do I have something on my chin?”. “Why are you eating your corn that way?” I didn’t try and sound too accusatory, then I illustrated what I meant. She just shrugged her shoulder and said, “I don’t know, I just like to eat it that way”. “But that’s not the way to eat corn on the cob. We all know that. Didn’t you ever see the old cartoon where they eat the corn like it was a typewriter and it dinged at the end and then they started on the next line? That is the proper way to eat corn-on-the-cob”. She fixed me in a stare that my daughter always uses when she puts me in my place. “First of all, what’s a typewriter?” She always knows how to hit deep. “Secondly, if it happened in a cartoon before the Simpson’s it doesn’t count and finally, I didn’t know there were rules about eating corn. I thought it was more a matter of nutrition than it was in following a set of arbitrary rules as set down by some fictional animated rendering that came from an age where grown up people thought the height of hilarity was watching a duck with a speech impediment dressed up in clothes and talking like a human.” It was at that point I realized we shouldn’t have sent her off to university to develop her critical thinking after all.

I did eventually tear my eyes away, even before I got a jab in the ribs from my wife, but I did punctuate my point. At the end of every row on my corn-on-the-cob I dinged and started on the next row down. Let her stare for a bit.