Good Manners
Better keep quiet
A few days ago my son Timmy celebrated his birthday with friends. Where? In a fun indoor playground called “Dragon Cave”.
A Groundhog Day. The same place (90% of children in my son’s class arrange parties there. Well, the town we live in is rather small.), the same script (A warm welcome, presents, wild chasing on the available attractions, more or less half way through there’s a birthday cake, blowing out candles, singing Happy Birthday and wild chasing on the attractions again.), the same faces of parents. For parents there’s always a separate table for hot drink and some cake. And to top it all, the same topics of conversation - everything that’s connected with children, surprisingly.
Near the middle of the party, kiddos are bumping into one another while running in mad circles, spirals and the like. Sometimes small heads pop up here and there, e.g. from a dragon’s oral cavity or from under its tail, somebody guffaws, another one weeps or screams blue murder and we parents sip coffee and converse about bad manners of today’s teenagers and smaller kids.
Jennifer’s grumbling about vulgar, abusive language of young people, particularly when they have elder siblings who don’t usually set the best example on earth. She adds that thank God her cutie Mike’s managed to stay away from this verbal hell and is generally regarded as a polite and tactful boy, just like his elder brother Paul.
Bravo! I sit quietly as, frankly speaking, Timmy does indeed copy his elder sister’s behaviors and verbalizations, which only brings me severe migraines. So, yes, I definitely keep quiet and look frantically around in search of something I haven’t come up with just yet.
It’s time for the birthday cake. Yay! Everything’s already been prepared, mini sandwiches, some sweets and fruit juice, and now an of-course-smiling-broadly lady from the staff is placing the cake on the table. My husband, John gets up to light the candles and I rise to call the kids dispersed all around. I take a deep breath to give a loud shout, but hear somebody else do it for me instead. It’s Mike himself, Jennifer’s son, yelling,
“Like Paul puts it, HEY YOU! MORONS AND BLOCKHEADS! MOVE YOUR ASSES HERE! TO THE PIGSTY! THEY’VE THROWN SOME GRUB FOR US!”
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