Mr. And Ms. Boor, I Presume?

By TAD BARTIMUS

Sunday was lazy. We sipped coffee, cooked a real breakfast, read the paper. We were savoring birdsong when an alien sound intruded at 8:38 a.m.

"Hey y'all, anybody home? Anybody in there?" The question, bellowed in an accent as thick as cold molasses, arrived in an unknown voice.

"Howdy, y'all! You awake this mornin'?" The stranger was definitely coming closer. My husband and I looked at each other. Who on earth? At this hour?

My disheveled spouse, an accommodating fellow, stood up in his bathrobe to investigate. Just below our window were a couple of tourists, perfectly dressed in designer resort wear, grinning up at us and pointing to our house: "Y'all wanna sell?"

"No thanks," said my husband. Then, because he'd been raised with good manners, he spent the next 10 minutes answering the interlopers' increasingly personal questions while I did a slow burn.

My spouse didn't grasp that these strangers had illegally entered our driveway, opened a closed steel cattle gate and crossed our yard without permission. He didn't have time to realize that these strangers were way out of line when they wanted to know, "How much did you pay for your house?"

That did it. I grabbed my spouse's bathrobe sash and took his place in the window. "Sorry," I barked, "we've got things to do. Go talk to a real estate agent. And close that gate on your way out!"

My angry amazement at such rudeness remains. In this rapidly escalating world the old, tidy order of personal privacy is being swept away by a tide of aggressive people who presume too much. Either they weren't taught how to behave or, more likely, they've chosen to believe the old order doesn't apply to them as their prosperity increases. That's the funny thing about new money – it breeds an unseemly sense of entitlement. I'm not even talking about millions here. A platinum Visa card in the hands of an egomaniac is like giving the keys of a racing Porsche to a 16-year-old boy on the day he gets his driver's license -- he thinks he knows what to do with it but he doesn't.

Why does the diner at the next table assume the right to gab on her endlessly ringing cell phone and disrupt my dinner? Why does the man in the hotel lobby think he has the right to light up a cigar and pollute my air? What presumption!

Americans increasingly give less thought to common courtesy and more to self-gratification. Just watch us eat in public, or speed past a school, or stand in line at an airline counter. On a recent trip to the Big City I let people pass in front of me, go first out of an elevator and take the bus seat if they were in greater need. I smiled at desk clerks and waiters, was patient with the harried and reminded myself that I wasn't on a life-and-death schedule. I even let my companion at a business lunch have the last piece of chocolate cake.

People acted like I'd arrived from another planet. And guess what? They responded in kind. In deconstructing why a dinner part was wonderful, I realized it was because no one talked (endlessly) about their stock market losses, the escalating value of their real estate or the price they'd paid for their new SUV to drive around New York City. Instead, we discussed art, music and even politics, but in respectful, civilized discourse. It was a lesson in elevating your mind as well as your sights.

So, Mr. and Ms. Boor, put a lid on it! If you don't know how to behave properly in polite company buy a book, take a course, hire a tutor, read Miss Manners. Above all, remind your kids they're not the center of the universe. Every time they get a hangnail we rush them to a specialist; why not devote half as much attention to their social behavior?

As for our nosy tourists? They went on down the road to disrupt some other unsuspecting soul's peaceful Sunday. Good riddance!

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