Short leashes

For better control

Some of you may wonder how it is that I frequently return to the shop where I work in order to draw inspiration for what I write here on apparently unrelated topics. The reason is that they are not unrelated. They are related. It’s just that I don’t always serve the relationship up to you in a manner that would be obvious for a blind man running for his life.

Our shop has a customer who often comes in with his little boy. The boy will be about four years old. The father is about mid- to late thirties, I reckon. Father gets busy with doing the formal part of the transaction, loading his purchases onto the conveyor belt, whereupon I start to scan them so that we can find out how much the final bill will be for his groceries. We are, he and I, so to speak, adults in the room. It is we who will negotiate the final cost of the goods and determine how the sum that is due will be paid and settled.

The gentleman’s little boy is (not) called Gervais. Gervais, while only four years old, is what I would call a proper little firebrand. When Gervais espies something that attracts his attention, no amount of cajoling or persuasion or outright commands from his father can draw him away from the item of intrigue. Last time they were in, it was Iron Brew flavoured pastilles that Gervais had taken a particular liking to. He pulled at the hanging cellophane packages, which, for the most part, resisted his juvenile tugging, just as soundly as Gervais himself resisted the verbal tugging from his father. The father at no time adopted a scolding tone. He did not lose his temper or express annoyance. He did not issue any threats or ultimatums. He was a model of calm, even though the little Gervais pushed his father’s composure to what I would have qualified as the limit.

As a supermarket cashier, it is not my part to intervene in remonstrating with a recalcitrant boy on behalf of his father. Nor is it my place to make any comment to the father reflecting upon his son’s behaviour. No, I may think whatever I like. But, as a representative of the shop, I may say nothing. I may look expectantly at the father hoping that perhaps eye contact could encourage him to prevent Gervais from detaching cellophane bags of boiled sweets from our display. And perhaps I might occasionally call over to Gervais to enquire in a cooing voice whether he might not like to help his daddy pack the groceries away. Gervais invariably remains unmoved. He is fixed on his goal of inspecting the bags of boiled sweets. Nothing, but nothing, can draw him away from that focus.

Now, if I were to say to you that, within this human constellation, I feel very much in the position of the European press, as I observe the gentle but feckless discipline exercised by a father over his stubbornly disobedient son, then you might appreciate how sorry I feel for the bag of Iron Brew pastilles, which plays the symbolic role of southern Lebanon in my little analogy here. Regardless of how much I might want to, there are third-party pressures on me preventing me from grabbing the unruly little tyke and pulling him right away from those tempting sacks of pastilles, gums and sherbets, and thrusting him into the arms of his daddy with an admonition to keep the little bundle of restlessness on a somewhat shorter tether.

Come to think of it, maybe they both need keeping on a short leash.