Yes, I saw it with my own eyes on my way home yesterday afternoon. The kid was with his sister and his papa. He was probably four, which is a little old for the oral phase. I mean, Freud said it begins at birth and lasts eight months. And the licking phase doesn’t kick in until adolescence.

Anyway, it’s funny what parenting does to you. You get totally desensitized. I mean, one thing kids do is condition you to choose your battles. Papa’s looking down at the kid licking the seatback and thinking, “well, it could be worse. He could be licking the floor, or the old woman next to him, or something.”

I went putt-putting with my brother and sister-in-law and their kids a while back. It was my nephew’s eighth birthday. He’s a handful, got ADHD and God knows what-all. So we’re eating pizza after our eighteen holes, or however many there are. By then he’s out of his mind, spinning so fast he can’t slow down. Everything becomes so immediate and urgent. He might as well be tripping.

The pizza’s fresh out of the oven, and you know what happens when you try to gobble it up when it’s piping hot like that. My nephew didn’t have the sense or simply the patience to blow on it, he just shoveled it in. Of course it burnt his tongue. So what’s he do? He spits it back out, onto the pizza we’re all eating. I mean, he was in too much of a hurry to bother with a plate of his own.

But not just once. The next bite was too hot, too, so he spit that one onto the pizza as well. And the next one. And no one seemed to even notice, or care. And that’s what happens after eight years of child-rearing. You’re like, “regurgitated pizza? Not a problem. Could be a lot worse.”

I didn’t see anything else of note on my journeys yesterday. This week’s commuter crowd seems very subdued, at least on my little route.