By Jim Hagarty
My wife bit her tongue during supper one night recently. Literally, not figuratively. The next night, I did the same. (My tongue, not hers, that is.) Again, at suppertime.
After much thought about this unhappy phenomenon, I came to realize these were not isolated incidents. We never bite our tongues except when we’re eating meals. There is a pattern to all this self-wounding: We are victims of that scourge of the modern age called “multitasking.”
After 27 years of marriage and two kids, mealtimes have become one of the few chances we seem to get any more to communicate. When the kids were young, we would talk and chew and chew and talk, all the while dodging flying food, plates and spoons coming from the direction of our toddlers, and sometimes, we chomped down on the wrong piece of meat while discussing the dramatic events of our day. We were like that gun-totin’ cartoon cowboy Quick Draw McGraw who would blast himself in the face with his pistol after losing track of when he was shooting and when he was blowing away the smoke from the end of the barrel.
Fortunately, recovery from a self-inflicted tongue bite is usually rapid. Other people, however, get themselves into predicaments more serious than that, running their cars into bridges and such, precisely because they are trying to accomplish two or more things at the same time.
I used to have a 45-minute drive to work every day and along the way, I noticed some strange sights in the cars that shared the roads with me. One day, as I was following a woman driver, I became curious when her head kept dipping below view as she seemed to be bobbing for something on the seat beside her. As I edged a bit closer, I realized that what she was doing, while steaming along at 100 kilometres an hour, was putting on makeup and planting her face an inch away from her rear-view mirror to make sure it was slathered on straight. I guess she was hoping to save the funeral director some time later on.
Not long after that, I followed a man who was weaving on the road, in and out of his lane. Looking more closely, it seemed to me he was talking on a cell phone. But when I got a better view, I could clearly see he was shaving with an electric razor and also gazing intently in his mirror to do a proper job. I felt as if I was an extra in some bizarre Mr. Bean epsiode.
We are obsessed with accomplishing our too many tasks and knowing we can never get them done one at a time, as our ancestors might have gone about them, we believe we need to do three or four of them at once. So, we watch the hockey game while playing cards with the neighbors, tape one show while viewing another, nurse the baby while checking our e-mail, read books while taking a bath and eat our meals while driving our cars, reading our papers and talking to our spouses. I heard recently of a woman who was regularly seen, on her noon break, eating her lunch, smoking a cigarette, knitting and reading, all at the same time. And the award goes to …
I know a man who never stands at a urinal without a magazine to read. How much reading can you get done during the average-length pee break? And to get even more accomplished, he usually strikes up a conversation with the fellow occupying the shiny white utility beside him, his eyes never leaving his story. Readin’, chattin’ and peein’. Doin’ it all.
A phone call used to be an event, perhaps the biggest one of your day. You sat down and enjoyed the conversation. You didn’t have much choice. The short black cord wouldn’t let you get too far from the machine which was often fastened tight to a wall. Now, telephones are just plastic appendages that hang off the sides of our heads like ugly growths. We yak into these devices while driving, cooking, doing dishes, dining in restaurants, or lying in bed. A status symbol of the new tycoon, apparently, is to have sex while closing a business deal on the phone.
I was once run down in my car at a four-way stop by a young man who was driving his nice big station wagon, all the while kissing his girlfriend. I could see the lovestruck driver through my rear-view mirror as he descended on me, and his date, with absolutely no clue that he was expected to come to a stop. Who has time for such trivia when there’s a luscious set of lips to be kissed? Whatever became of parking? Have the young even lost time for that?
In the old days, in the homes of the rich and snobby, and others with just good manners, talking at the dinner table was discouraged. First everybody ate, then they passed around the cigarettes, then they conversed.
Maybe they didn’t get the meal over with in seven minutes flat. But at least they usually went to bed with unbitten tongues in their heads.
