© Pierre Maré,
2004 - 2007
Offbeat 119
Things were different when last I was at school, which is quite a long, long time ago. In the last column, I mentioned shooting. We didn’t have shooting, unless it was a formal extra-curricular activity in which we shot at cardboard targets, even though we may have wanted to harm our teachers and fellow students.
There were other sins and ‘things that were frowned upon’, however. Smoking was a definite no-no, especially in the junior grades, when playing with matches was a dangerous thing. Other sins on the list included drinking, looking up girls skirts, not doing homework, failing tests, having long hair, not shining shoes and generally looking sloppy and unwashed. Vandalising the headmaster’s office was definitely out, even if it was a well-intentioned pre-primary redecoration effort using wood glue and newspaper.
Yet the sins that stand out most clearly in my mind were those impressed upon us in our first years at ‘big school’, by our terrifyingly tall headmaster, ‘Atom Bomb Atkins’: slouching with one leg crossed over the other, having hands in pockets, responding with ‘hey’ to anything, and chewing gum. None of these are things that I can do with any degree of comfort.
To this day, whenever someone says ‘hey’ at me, the image springs to mind of Mr. Atkins politely asking some terrified kid if he thought that the mighty headmaster could possibly be in any way related to a donkey? Such is the power of the lessons learned in early years.
Although these four meager sins superficially don’t appear to amount to much, one still stands out to me as supremely heinous: chewing gum, or ‘chewing the cud’, as the Atom Bomb put it.
To my mind, there are things that set people apart from one another: painting a house virulent pink, laughing at one’s own jokes, voting without thinking and consciously choosing not to read. Yet by far the most demeaning thing to dignity is chewing gum.
I remember a cruel headmaster once saying to some hapless kid, “If you don’t have anything intelligent to say, keep your mouth shut.” It may have worked: the kid became an author to the best of my knowledge. But the kid was probably smarter than the headmaster, even then.
Perhaps this will work… “If you don’t have a thought in your head, don’t try to compensate by chewing gum.” I hope that helps. But as I write this I see the vacant eyes of people chewing gum, and doubt that this column will be on their reading list.
Cruel as it may seem, there are reasons to exclude people who chew gum. For a start, they are unemployable. There is nothing as unappealing as talking to someone on the phone, who does not have the decency to remove the nasty glob of resin from his or her mouth. The noise is repulsive. Nor is it appealing to look into the mouth of someone chewing gum, while trying to get a request across.
By the same token, why include someone in a social circle who is more interested in masticating than talking? There are appropriate moments for the combination of mastication and friendship: dinner parties for instance. Gum does not qualify as good food, nor does it sit well with white or red wine.
And then there is the issue of health: where does the gum go to when it loses its flavour? In my experience, it usually appears under someone’s shoe. Or it lurks around a piece of furniture waiting to become a nasty surprise.
In spite of the fact that dreadful movies are made about arbitrary use of the death penalty in Malaysia, there must be some vestige of civilization there: Singapore has banned chewing gum. Good for them!
Is not chewing gum really so important? I suppose so. The points of the lesson, as I sit and analyze it, are to eat only in hygienic conditions, to eat silently and to keep your mouth shut while eating. And there is also the little matter of being respectful to others.
The small lessons we learn in our terrified youth define us as individuals, and groups of individuals form civilizations. Don’t chew gum. Oh, and please don’t wear a hat indoors either.
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