Last Wednesday I was at the pub because that's what Wednesdays are. I fucking love my pub. If you know me you know which one it is and if you don't know me then never mind, forget I said anything, the last thing I need is more people in it. I am going to make cookies for my pub or a tremendous cake, I'm not kidding. The women are nice and know our names; we know theirs. The one guy is a Boston charmer, asks how we are and gives a shit, calls me "doll" and is exuberant, which only gets better when he's had a few; I know one day he is going to hug me and that will be fine. Pretty much everyone knows better than to bring us menus.
Sometimes we get smiley attention from servers who are not technically our servers at the moment. One I've been able to enlist as a spy, to help me eavesdrop on other customers. This is valuable.
I have never consumed a drop of alcohol within my pub because, I don't know, I just haven't. The pub is for dinner and sitting. Once, we were there so long our waitress asked us if we were having our house fumigated. No we just love it here.
My pub has board games, hundreds of books, medical and planetary diagrams, and very few total wankers. It has two televisions with the volume turned down very low. They are not obnoxious. At six o'clock they show the news. My pub is a nerd. I am not bluffing about the cookies.
So I was there last Wednesday and the next table had a kid, his dad, and some woman: dad's date or potential new wife. She was not popular with the kid, for good reason; she was an idiot. The kid was silently reeling in justified thirteen-year-old mortification even before she asked him about girls. Jesus.
The kid was not subtle about wanting something to take him away from the table. He turned entirely around in his seat to see his options, then asked the waitress with desperation if he could play darts. Of course. It was interesting to watch him weigh the discomfort of making conversation against the discomfort of playing darts alone. I'm not inventing things; it was clear he felt ill at ease and embarrassed - a pale, sweaty teenager who managed to be both fat and gangly, standing in a business traditionally meant for adults, on display for everyone else in the pub. He kept whipping his head around to scan the room to see if anyone was watching him. I know this because he caught me (once) and glared.
I looked away but it was an easy thing to get away with; he turned his head after every other dart. I wanted to give him the gift of at least one person not caring what he was doing, but I also wanted to spy. I can do both. I saw his violent blush fade until his face was back to pasty normal, but still tense and furrowed, which slowly relaxed until he was just a person amusing himself, no big deal. When the food arrived he went back to the table and thunked into the booth with a sigh that might have been happy, contented at least, and I saw him grace his father's date with a genuine smile. Maybe things went sour again from there, I don't know, that's when I chose to stop listening. I think my pub makes me hate my fellow man a little less.
