Some people just shouldn’t procreate.

Last night Rebecca and I went out to try a new Asian restaurant here in town. The menu was good and the food excellent but our meal was practically ruined by a family sitting in the next booth.

Here’s what happened: A mom and dad are talking across the table. The mom and the little boy are in the seat that shares a back with my seat. The booths aren’t huge; the little boy is at most about two feet from his mother.

About one minute after we sat down the little boy sticks his hand through the small space between the back of the booth and the seat and taps me on the side. Some people might have found that annoying, others would have found it cute; I guess it all depends on your disposition towards kids. As for me, I’m thinking its kind of cute and he’s a playful kid but I’m here to have dinner with my wife and I really don’t want to play --so I just ignored him and I scooted over about a foot so he couldn’t reach me.

His little hand came through the back of the booth a few more times over the next five or ten minutes and then he quit. I want to stress here that he really wasn’t being annoying, he was just six or seven and bored and since his parents weren’t paying any attention to him he decided to play with the people at the next booth.

Unfortunately, he was also persistent and since I moved out of range of his hand he turned around and blew on the back of my head over the seat. Ok, that’s a little more annoying. He did it a second time and I turned around and asked him not to do it. He did it again and I asked him a second time not to do it. The fourth time I went back to his parents’ table and told him in front of them that I was serious that he needed to stop it. His mother started to lay into him and I told her that she bore some of the responsibility as well since this was all happening just two feet from her head and that the dad, if he had looked at his son for even a second should have seen that he was turned around in the seat blowing on the head of the guy in the next booth.

Well that really did it. They lectured him what a rotten kid he was for always embarrassing them that way for the next half hour, maybe forty-five minutes. My dinner, although the food was excellent, was pretty grim. The thing is the kid wasn’t doing anything that bad; it’s just that his parents weren’t paying any attention to him at all. He was bored and wanted attention.

I thought about going back and telling the parents that they were the real culprits but I knew that would have only made matters worse for the little guy. They would have blamed him for that too.

As we got up to leave they made him come and apologize to me. I wanted to tell him to run for the door, run, I’ll keep your parents from getting you. Instead I told him it was ok. “Don’t tell him it’s ok!” Squawked his mom, “he does this every time we go somewhere.” I was kneeling when I was talking to him so I stood up, and looked her square in the face, and as menacingly as I could told her “he was apologizing to me, I can accept it if I want to.” I hope I scared the shit out of her.

I guess the best I can do is to hope they don’t fuck that little boy up too much over the next ten years and that someday he’ll marry a wonderful person and have a happy life.