I was in the doctor’s waiting room recently and, as always, there’s a variety of people anxiously awaiting their turn to see a physician.

On the couch to my left was a young couple. Both husband and wife were glued to their cell phones, seldom talking, but I’ve come to accept that as the new norm because they were probably texting each other.

On the next row over, a 60-something-year old man in designer clothing was filling out paperwork while his stylishly dressed wife waited next to him.

She kept tossing her hair back – that’s what caught my attention – and I watched them for a while as they went back and forth to the nurse’s desk.

She was holding something in her hand the whole time they walked around, and I realized it was a giant container of gum.

Sure enough, she was chomping away, and she did so the whole time we were all there – over three hours. Everybody, I realized, has their own way to cope with stress.

A middle-aged couple came in, and it was obvious they’d been in a motorcycle accident. The man was limping, carrying two scuffed-up helmets, and both he and his wife had huge bandages on their forearms and elbows.

Two EMTs accompanied them, and it wasn’t hard to figure out an ambulance had transported them to the office, not their Harley.

While I was busy observing other people, I kept hearing someone burping, and burping loudly.

My mom reared me to be polite, so I didn’t turn around at first. But after a half hour of non-stop burps, I looked to see who was belching with abandon.

It was an elderly woman, probably in her 80s, and she hadn’t a care in the world about venting the gas in her tummy.

She’d open her mouth, let out a loud burp and go right back to visiting with her son while eating a take-out dinner.

At first, I was embarrassed for her. It’s considered bad manners to burp that loudly in public without saying “excuse me.”

Maybe she didn’t realize what she was doing, but when she started issuing orders to the grown man and woman accompanying her, there wasn’t a doubt she had all her faculties.

And, in between the orders, she continued to belch without once saying “excuse me.”

Maybe she had the right idea.

At her age, who cares what anybody else thinks about a normal bodily function? She obviously didn’t, and she didn’t hesitate a minute when the nurse asked if she needed anything.

“An Alka-Seltzer,” I thought to myself.

“A blanket,” she said. “It’s cold in here.”

The woman was right – it was freezing in that waiting room, but she was the only one with enough nerve to ask for what she wanted.

A few minutes later, the nurse gently covered her with a warmed blanket that she settled into with, of course, a few more belches and burps.

Maybe we need to stop apologizing for things we have no control over. I find myself apologizing to people all the time when they walk in front of me, when I have to squeeze past them in the movie theater or when I do something I’m not sorry for but I feel I have to offer an apology.

The next time I feel a belch coming on, I’ll see if I can let loose and not say “I’m sorry” a dozen times.

Perhaps I can follow this woman’s lead, burp and keep right on doing what I was doing.

What’ll really happen is I’ll think about her when I burp, all alone in the living room, and then apologize to the couch.

 

This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.