I admit it, I can sometimes get hangry.  Like this morning for instance as we were driving all over town to find a breakfast restaurant that didn’t have a line going out the door waiting for a table.  Sure, we didn’t leave as early as we should have, but I’m pretty sure everyone in Lincoln was looking for good old breakfast comfort food to deal with the grey, rainy conditions.

After several tries, we finally stopped looking and decided to just deal with the line.  Everyone in this particular line was waiting patiently while the young man scrambling around the room was doing everything he could do to clean tables and get people in them as fast as he could.  And then arrived the hangry old lady.

“We need to get in to put in our names”.  Nobody is putting in names – we’re just waiting our turn.  “But they always take names.  Don’t they always take names?”  Her voice swelled to the height of her teased white bouffant.  “I’m just going to make him take names”.  As she pushed her way through the rest of us, who by this time had gotten very quiet, just to watch the show, she grabbed the young man’s attention and again said “can you please take everyone’s name so we can be seated?”  Never mind that he had been seating people at a pretty steady pace since we had entered the restaurant.

The young man, who was looking pretty frazzled, respectfully picked up an empty order pad and began asking names and numbers in everyone’s party through us and then stopped to keep doing other things.  “Well, he WAS taking names and then he stopped” she said in her shrill voice.  At this point, my husband broke the silence and said, “so, like I was saying…” at which point everyone smiled.

The interesting thing was that despite the fact that he had begun writing names and numbers, he did not change his approach to seating groups.  It was first come, first served, which seemed to go unnoticed by the older lady wanting his to write things down.  As long as he was writing things down, she was ok.

After we were seated, which didn’t take very long, I looked at my husband and said, if I EVER act that way in public, you have my permission to smack me.  Not that he would actually do that, but he got my point.  The problem is, I’m beginning to behave and say things just like that little old lady.  Not out loud to people other than my husband, but that’s just a matter of time isn’t it.  How long will it be before I’m yelling and gesturing at people who don’t use their turn signals or tailgate me?  How long before I begin looking at kids and saying things like, are you serious?  Oh, ok, maybe I’m already doing that.  But as I watched the other people in the line look at her, or away from her, I thought, I don’t want people to think of me in that way.  I’m sure she’s a lovely woman and probably has grandkids who love her.  She’s just gone over the deep end where she really doesn’t care what she says or when she says it.

This is something I think about as I creep ever closer to 30 years of teaching experience.  At this point, when I think I’ve seen just about everything, something else comes down the educational pike and I find myself thinking, and sometimes out loud, are you serious?  I get concerned that I get stuck in that old lady mode where anything new is bad and “that’s the way we used to do it and we liked it!” is the way it should be.  I understand change is good, but when so many times I see the baby being thrown out with the bath water, I want to say whoa, wait a minute.  Not everything old has to be thrown out just because you want to incorporate something new.  It’s a lot like music in church.  Just because there is new music to sing doesn’t mean you can’t sing something with a melody once in a while.  Just sayin’.

My fear is that in my head I’m this hip, forward thinking, young grandma (relatively speaking) and the truth will be that I’m that grumpy, hangry old lady.  Hopefully I’ll have people who care about me enough to tell me if they see this starting or pray for me if it already has.