Last week I wrote about a friend’s predicament when she saw an irate, able-bodied man behaving rudely and wrathfully to a frail old lady.
The scene was a public library, of all places. The man had leaned on his horn while she inched her car into a handicapped parking space; later, inside the building, he shouted at the elderly woman for getting in his way. My friend wanted to give the guy a piece of her mind. In the end, she quailed and chose instead to say something consoling to the target of his rage. The angry man stalked away, unrebuked.
The story really struck a chord with readers. Witnessing episodes of that sort — or being in the distressing thick of them — leaves a feeling of justice unresolved. Even much later, we may be hit with l’esprit d’escalier, that maddening flash of realizing too late what we should have said.
(The phrase is meant to evoke a passing moment on the stairs, but personally, I still replay scenes from decades past and work on my lines. If I ever run into a certain spiteful Manhattan bus driver again, boy, I’m going to let him have it!)
Reader Beverly Hubbard, who drives a special needs school bus in Loudoun County, still seethes over an episode from the late 1990s. She had gone to see “Saving Private Ryan” with a friend who was confined to a wheelchair. Out of consideration, the cinema’s management allowed her to bypass the long ticket line. Hubbard told me: “A man in the crowd said loudly, ” ‘Oh, look at that! We all get to stand here while they let the guy in the wheelchair in first!’ ”
Hubbard says she had to bite her tongue to keep from snapping, “Be grateful you can stand!” Not wanting to prolong her friend’s embarrassment, she got him into the theater as quickly as possible. But the scene still rankles.
A reader from Spring Valley wrote to say that she’s kicking herself for not intervening recently when she saw two teenage girls barging past a tottery old man. They wanted to enter a delicatessen; he happened to be leaving it. She watched the fellow pause in confusion as the door he was about to push suddenly swung open. The girls seemed to register that they faced an obstruction without noticing that it happened to be human, and elderly. So they simply pushed past the man, sending him off balance.
“I don’t understand it,” the man had said, when the reader rushed up to steady him. “Don’t their parents teach them anything these days?”
The Irish grandmother of reader Fred Stokeld Sr. would probably have known how to handle those girls. She had a neat riposte for those who behaved impolitely toward her in public.
“If you’ll pardon my ignorance, I’ll pardon your manners,” she’d say. It’s a sentence — worth borrowing, don’t you think? — that nicely delivers equal measures of charm and acid.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at mgurdon@washington examiner.com.
