His mouth was full and it would prove to be his downfall. He was 15 years old and had ridden his bicycle to the local diner for an early Saturday afternoon burger. A treat he occasionally granted himself after conducting lawn mowing duties for his neighborhood customers. He was generally regarded as a well behaved boy. His eating habits, however, were rugged.
His appetite was healthy, not repulsive, aggressive nor excessive. The haste with which he consumed his meals, though, was troubling, even to his enablers. He ate with the haste one would assume is learned from growing up in jail or the combative facilities of a shared dining hall in a juvenile delinquents detention center. But this fellow had no such background. He came from good people. The kind of people that let their children know their number one goal was to grow up and become good people. Being smart, innovate, or industrious were also commendable qualities, but be a good person. To be clear, this young fellow was already in compliance with those wishes, but the art of eating was an area of blatant failure.
He knew savor only as a word in the dictionary, it had no intersection with his life experience. Even when instructed to take remedial action as it pertains to culinary etiquette he seemed helplessly incapable of amending this poor behavior. Simply unable, much as one could not prevent closing their eyes while sneezing.
The diner was crowded on this weekend afternoon. He was lucky to get a seat at the window and the red and white checkered countertop was freshly wiped down. He was able to stare across the street and watch his bicycle where he left it on the steps of a church. His meal arrived and his appetite was equal to the challenge. He piled all the vegetable dressings and condiments onto his burger then plied his fries with ketchup. With his typical lack of restraint he commenced the meal’s consumption with alarming zest.
As the second bite of burger was shoved into his mouth, it was still loaded with an abundance of debris from the first bite plus the fries he also managed to stuff into his crowded pie hole. The boy’s mouth was full. A disgusting vision to behold if you could not find some way to avert your eyes. The boy, watching his mode of transport as noted, spied a pair of local ruffians nosing around his bicycle across the street, then get on it and ride away. He was watching his bicycle be stolen!
He jumped from his seat and tried to yell. With the prodigious amounts of food stuffed in his gullet his yells were stifled. It was a tight fit mashing that burger around in there. Tight like an overstuffed pillow struggling into a custom fitted pillow case. The thickly coagulated mass of burger detritus impeded his ability of speech more thoroughly than had he been gagged with a pair of wet gym socks. People thought he was choking. He pointed out the window trying to explain about his bicycle, but the intent was lost on the other diners. Being well mannered he knew he couldn’t spit out the food from his mouth, how uncouth, how impolite. What a rude spectacle this would make of himself. He couldn’t run out of the diner chasing the thieves because he had not yet paid his bill. Folks might think he was making for a free meal. He had effectively trapped himself with the quick consecutive engorging bites of his delicious charbroiled burger.
His wild pantomiming, farcical gesticulating and incoherent vocalizations alarmed the other diners. The manager rapidly approached hoping to restore calm but the vision of the tragic load in the boy’s mouth was too strong. So completely was the desperate, violent struggle of mastication conveyed to the man that he was immediately overcome with an irrevocable revulsion that sent him reeling back from whence he came. One hand powerfully covering his mouth, the other wildly waving kitchen staff out of the way in his emergency retreat looking for clear ground in case he were to blow. The load with which the boy had drastically encumbered himself was undaunted like a reigning victorious entity unto itself.
He watched the youths take his bicycle and they were now out of sight. He sat back down and stopped yelling. This put the other diners at ease to some extent, although they continued to watch him to see what might happen next. He still could not speak due to the amount of cud he was working. A swig of milk shake did not help to dilute the thick stew. It was lost. He would finish his lunch, pay his bill then walk home.
After such an experience most people would reflect back and conclude that they needed to rethink the pace at which they ate. This boy did the same. The conclusion most people would draw compared to that of our young man, though, were wildly divergent. Most people would decide they needed to slow down their eating pace allowing for more civil consumption, but not the boy. He decided that if he’d only eaten even more quickly he could have been out there to defend against his bicycle’s abduction. More quickly, he thought, more quickly! The horror! There would be no saving this one.
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