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D. None of the above

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Tom and Tim grew up great friends. Soon after they learned how to spell, they figured out “i” and “o” were the only difference in their names.

They liked their parents, teachers and country. The United States, as they were told, was the greatest country in the world. Their grandparents, as they’d find out on a rainy Sunday when they watched a TV show about a country in Europe that didn’t exist anymore, came from the same place.

“We could be related,” Tim said.

Tom thought Tim would be a much better relative than his Uncle Oswald, who wreaked of cologne and was always trying to give him great advice about his life. Tom wanted to become a baseball player and he wanted to marry a woman some day who could make apple pies because he loved apple pies.

Tim also wanted to become a baseball player, but his mother wanted him to play the trumpet.

Tom also wanted to play an instrument, so he started playing the trumpet, too.

Competition got the better of Tim and Tom. They stopped hanging out because they wanted to practice separately, so they could win the solo in the concert and so Heather, the best trombone player in the band, would notice them.

When the music teacher, Mr. Holden, chose Tom to play the solo, Tim stopped talking to Tom, Heather and Mr. Holden.

Tim’s mother didn’t understand why he was quiet and angry. She read books on how to let go while lending a hand. One day, Tim told her about the solo, so she hired the best music teacher in the area.

Soon enough, Tim was better than Tom on the trumpet. Everyone, including Mr. Holden, could tell, so the teacher gave the solo to Tim.

Tom found out about the new trumpet teacher and he, too, became a student. Tim and Tom filled their block, night and day, with the sound of blaring trumpets.

As the concert approached, Mr. Holden became dismayed at how the two trumpet players were trying to drown each other out. He sent Tom out of a rehearsal, which caused the lower brass and flutes to stop playing because they supported Tom. When Tom returned, however, the bickering continued, so Mr. Holden sent Tim out of the room, at which point the clarinets and percussion stopped playing.

Mr. Holden removed the song with the trumpet solo from the concert. The boys blamed each other and, soon enough, an all-out war on social media broke out between Tim, Tom and the parts of the band that backed each of them.

Mr. Holden threatened to cancel the concert, but the town wouldn’t allow it, especially because the concert was the highlight of the July Fourth celebration.

One day, when Tom was too tired to play the trumpet and he wanted to get away from his annoying uncle, he collapsed on the couch and turned on the TV. He watched a black-and-white film about people coming from the country where his grandparents were born.

When the show ended, Tom got on his bike and rode to Mr. Holden’s house. He rang the bell.

“Mr. Holden, can you please put the original song back in the program? I’d like Tim to play the solo,” Tom said.

Mr. Holden smiled.

“He just asked me if you could play the solo,” Mr. Holden said, opening the door to reveal Tim standing in the kitchen.

When the concert ended, Tim and Tom were sure of one thing: They had to be related.

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By Daniel Dunaief

Hurry, hurry, hurry! You’ve got five minutes to get to the high school before your daughter’s graduation. It usually takes six. You might have to go faster than the speed limit, but you’ve done it before.

Your daughter looks great and she’s so calm. You push on the accelerator on the straight road ahead. Your daughter takes a deep breath.

OK, just a little faster and you’ll make it. Oh, no, no, no, a small car pulls in front of you. It’s being driven at 25 mph in a 35 mph zone. Why do cars pull in front of you and then go slowly? “Come on!” you implore, flicking your fingers forward as if you were trying to scratch a chalkboard from the bottom up.

“Dad, it’s OK,” your daughter insists. “I don’t want you to be late,” you say.

You drive carefully around a curve and head for another straight part of the road. You reach a stop sign, where a BMW misses an opening to go. It was a small one, but you’ve got to make your own openings in this town. That’s what you’d tell everyone today if you were giving the speech your daughter won the right to deliver.

Your daughter did better in school than you did. That makes you proud, but you don’t have time to be proud. All these people are slowing you down. You just have a few more turns.

A Girl Scout troop crosses the road in front of you. Your daughter was in Girl Scouts years ago, but you don’t like them now. They’re making you late for such an important day for the family.

Then the Girl Scouts, whose uniforms make you think of those mint cookies, cross the street. You’re a block from the school and a sedan takes forever to park.

You grind your teeth and lift your hand to touch the horn. Your daughter puts her hand firmly on yours and shakes her head slowly.

The woman with streaks of gray in her hair and a green suit looks vaguely familiar as she gets out of a car.

Finally, you park, get in the school and, shockingly, your daughter’s friends have reserved you great seats.

You pick up your phone to start recording your daughter’s speech. The camera’s out of memory. You grind your teeth as you try to delete enough old pictures to record this magic moment.

“Good morning,” your daughter’s voice offers the room. Your wife tells you to stop fiddling with your phone and look up. After your daughter shares memories of high school, she wants to offer advice to her class.

“I want you to remember to leave some margin for error,” she urges. Right, you smile. Your daughter, who made so many fewer errors than you did, is talking to the other people about their mistakes. You nod to the other people.

“If we need to do something, to be somewhere or to accomplish anything, we need to accept that the route might include detours or unexpected obstacles,” she offers, sharing that crooked smile she developed in middle school. “It’s not anyone else’s fault. If it’s important, don’t blame the obstacles. Be prepared for them. Planning means understanding them and giving yourself some extra time to reach your goals.”

You take a deep breath, the way she did so many times while she waited for you at the entrance to the house. You look around the room to see if anyone else knows she’s talking to you. You now recognize the woman on stage with streaks of gray in her hair and a green suit; she’s the superintendent of schools.

You realize how much smarter your daughter is than you.

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Waves of nostalgia can hit at any time. They tend to wash ashore more frequently in between graduations with their “look back, look forward” speeches and weddings. During these transition phases, we recall the days gone by, whether we’re suddenly comparing a memory from a few years to a decade or more earlier.

We watch our children stretch out surprisingly long arms to take a diploma and shake the hand of a school official, recalling how those hands used to reach up high to grab ours as we crossed the street.

We listen to their confident voices as they share detailed, measured and elaborate opinions about politics, sports, social issues or music. At the same time, we replay the high voices in our heads when they shared thoughts that weren’t so complex, as in “Jimmy Neutron is the best.”

When my wife and I walk around town, we frequently stop outside T-ball baseball games, where we soak in the figurative nostalgia bathtub. Johnny swings at seven pitches before he finally dribbles a ball foul. The exhausted coach encourages Johnny to “run, run, run!” Once the boy reaches first base, a small smile fills a round face that will get longer and leaner in the days ahead, until he reaches the stage where he rolls his eyes when people around him speak of sports because he and his razor stubble have tuned into the world of guitars and rock bands.

For some high school graduates, home has become a launchpad, where the NASA countdown to lift off for college will thrust them to a new location.

And then there are the brides and grooms, whose parents may recall their own weddings even as they smile at the way their children are planning to have people on stilts passing out hors d’oeuvres. The reason no one else thought of it, we think, is because it seems impractical, even though we don’t say that because we don’t want to rain on our children’s parade.

The parents of the bride and groom may remember the people who surrounded them at their wedding, from family members to important friends. Parents may have spent extra time searching through alumni directories or online listings to find the addresses of some of those important friends they haven’t seen in decades to invite them to another can’t-miss wedding.

Parents may stare at their children and recall the long journey from the cooties and a fear fascination with love and romance, to this moment when their child plans to travel the rest of his or her life with this marital partner.

What good does nostalgia do? It offers an opportunity to reflect on the past, while overlaying memories with current experiences. While we’re dancing to music we heard years ago, maybe at our own weddings or on an early date with a future spouse, we may close our eyes and reconnect with the younger version of ourselves. We remember who we were and who we wanted to be. We may laugh, realizing how far we have to go, or boost our resolve as we observe the changes in ourselves and others around us that encourage us to believe that anything, improbable or difficult though it may seem, is still possible.

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If you’re reading this on a cellphone somewhere, please stop. No, seriously. You can read it on your computer or in an actual copy of the paper but, please, stop reading this and look around you.

OK, are you back in your office or at your home?

It’s disturbing how often our cellphones become an escape from the here and now. I get it: We’re waiting in line to order a hamburger and we want to do something, so we plan our vacations or send text messages to our friends.

In the process, we’ve lost sight of what’s around us. It’s as if we’ve covered our eyes with electronic blinders and we can’t be bothered to pay attention to our surroundings.

I was recently driving through town and noticed a woman walking a large, chocolate Labrador along the sidewalk. His rear legs were pointed out as he walked. As I drove by, I noticed that the woman held the leash on her wrist as she was completely absorbed in her cellphone. Seconds later, the dog relieved himself on the sidewalk while trying to keep up with his oblivious owner. The dog looked uncomfortable as he tried to multitask.

I realize dogs are an enormous responsibility and that every time someone walks a dog, that person may not feel the urge to dedicate his or her complete attention to a conversation with the family pet.

“Hey, Tigger, look at that squirrel over there. Oh, wow, there’s a bunny. Do you see the bunny? Oh, wait, there are two bunnies.”

“What do you smell, Fifi? Was there another dog here a few hours ago and did he leave you a little scent present?”

We don’t have to connect with our pets every moment of every day. But wouldn’t it be nice if we were able to pay them some attention while we were out walking them? After all, how often do they come over to us when we’ve had a tough day, or give us their paw—or offer us companionship?

Everywhere we go, we have the opportunity to tune out the world around us and surf our way to somewhere else.

It’s thrilling to travel halfway around the world and send pictures instantly of a magnificent sunset, or the Eiffel Tower or a three-toed sloth. We can be connected to almost anyone almost anytime.

That shouldn’t give us license to disconnect from the people and the pets around us. It’s the economic concept of opportunity cost applied to our attention. The opportunity cost of paying attention to what’s on our phone is that we ignore our surroundings.

Remember those public service announcements which said, “It’s 10 o’clock, do you know where your children are?” Maybe we should have messages that pop up on our phone suggesting that “It’s 6 o’clock, do you know where you are,” or maybe, “It’s 6 o’clock, pick up your head and check out the here and now (or H&N).”

Maybe we should also develop an H&N logo we can put on clothing or notebooks. It can even become a verbal reminder to our companions.

“Class,” a teacher might say as she noticed her students taking furtive glances at their phones, “H&N, right? Let’s learn the material now, while you’re here.”

H&N may be a way of encouraging us to be where our bodies are at the moment, and not where the internet has taken us.

Dogs, meanwhile, shouldn’t have to multitask while they’re relieving themselves. If Fluffy could talk, she might say, “For goodness’ sake, H&N, I need a moment here.”

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I have hundreds of new friends I’ve never met, and a profound appreciation for the people who created them or shared their lives.

I recently attended my first BookExpo at the Javits Center in New York City, where I was surrounded by booksellers, librarians, agents, book publishers and authors including Stephen King, James Patterson and John Grisham, with numerous budding luminaries in the mix.

A highlight for me was a panel of children’s book authors, which included actress Isla Fisher, who has starred in movies including “Wedding Crashers” and “Definitely, Maybe.” While I was intrigued to see Ms. Fisher in person, the other authors owned the stage, as Fisher readily admitted that she wasn’t a writing peer to her fellow panelists.

Jason Reynolds, an African-American writer for middle-grade and young adult novels, electrified the audience.

He talked about how he used to visit his great Aunt Blanche in South Carolina, where the sun was so scorching it burned his neck. His aunt, who was 85, sat on her hot porch, smoking cigarettes and watching the children.

Aunt Blanche planted a pecan tree — as he said, a “pea can” — when she was 4. The tree had become enormous by the time Reynolds was a child, providing shade for the younger crowd.

Reynolds, a 2016 National Book Award Finalist for Young People’s Literature with “Ghost,” suggested that books offered the kind of shade he desperately needed, providing relief from the heat.

Reynolds asked himself, “What if I get to be the pecan tree?”

Jennifer Weiner, meanwhile, has ventured from the world of adult fiction and “Good in Bed” to writing for a younger audience, which includes her recent book, “The Littlest Bigfoot.”

Weiner said she does much of her writing in the equivalent of a large closet in her home, although she completed “half of a book waiting in a carpool line.”

Dutch author Marieke Nijkamp shared some insights into her latest book “Before I Let Go,” which is about a girl named Corey who loses her best friend Kyra.

Nijkamp, with fans waiting in a long line for the blue-haired author’s signature, said she “definitely goes for a walk right after I kill a character.”

While circling the Javits Center exhibits, I bumped into Owen King. He is the son of acclaimed author Stephen King, and is promoting a book he wrote with his father called “Sleeping Beauties,” in which all the women but one in a small Appalachian town become wrapped in a cocoon when they go to sleep. If someone awakens them, they become violent. That leaves the men without the civilizing and calming influence of women. It sounded to me like an adult version of William Golding’s classic “Lord of the Flies.”

In describing the novel, Owen King said he enjoyed the time writing and editing the book with his father. He described how a King dinner time activity includes coming up with story ideas, many of which never see the light of day.

I asked Owen, who was clad in an untucked plaid shirt and looks remarkably like his father, what caught his eye at the Expo. He highlighted a book by Steve Steinberg about a Yankees pitcher named Urban Shocker. King said he loved the name and found the story compelling, about a pitcher who went 18-6 in the Yankees’ famous 1927 season despite battling heart disease. I picked up a copy, which was autographed for my son, and I look forward to learning about Shocker’s world.

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We all have our routines. We go to certain restaurants, drive certain routes to work and support certain gas stations, where we know we’ll get a competitive price, a friendly response from the attendant and rapid service.

When we travel, everything changes. We sleep in unfamiliar beds, flick the channels on television stations where the stations aren’t the same numbers as they are on Long Island, and navigate along routes that aren’t our familiar pattern.

Breaking the routine offers us a chance to step away from our lives and to experience something new. Maybe we’ll go to a museum in a new city or visit a place we’ve seen in a movie, which blends both the familiar and the unknown.

Our level of adventure and appetite for risk — as in, what happens if I don’t like the experience — can rise or fall depending on our travel companions.

Recently, I visited another city for a weekend with my daughter, who was traveling with a group of her teenage contemporaries and their parents. We all managed to get to our designated stops in our cars and to return to a hotel chain so ubiquitous that, with the blinds closed and without access to the local weather on TV, we could have been in Anywhere, USA.

We each had a GPS and an address for our activities which reduced both the stress and the adventure that came from the unknown.

While we could have gotten lost, the probability of that seemed slim. Getting lost, nerve-racking as it might have been 20 years ago, is almost an impossibility with navigation systems built into cars, phones and watches.

Following an afternoon activity, several of the girls decided they were hungry. One of the members of the group suggested a national pizza chain, to which the others readily agreed.

I wrinkled my brow at the suggestion and wondered, as a cellphone order was quickly placed, whether we might want to try a local pizza restaurant instead.

“No, that’s OK,” I was assured. “This will be better.”

I waited in a packed car until the order was placed, at which point the girl in the back transferred the address to her mother, who was riding shotgun during my weekend away with my daughter.

“Honey,” the mom said, “are you sure you dialed the closest restaurant?”

“Yes,” the daughter grumbled, shaking her head at her mother.

“I just checked the address for this restaurant and it’s two hours from here. You sure you want a pizza that far away?”

“Wait, what?” the daughter said, double-checking the address and the phone. Sure enough, the restaurant was on the other side of the state.

“Wait, before you order from a closer one,” I said, as she was already searching her phone for a nearby restaurant, “we’re sitting right outside a pizza restaurant. Don’t you want to try this one?”

“No, thanks,” she said, trying to be polite to someone else’s parent. “We want this one.”

When we got to the closer restaurant, we ran into another parent who was picking up pizza for his family. With so many other local choices, how did both families make the identical choice?

I suppose they might have discussed their food preference during the day. That was unlikely, given the social split in the group.

Alternatively, they have become so accustomed to the familiar that they prefer it, even when traveling.

I suppose when the opportunity for something new and different knocks, people don’t always feel the urge to answer the door.

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He survived all manner of close calls when he saved the world seven times but my favorite James Bond, Sir Roger Moore, succumbed to cancer earlier this week at the age of 89.

Many of my friends and contemporaries thought Sean Connery’s suave and debonair flair for the super spy with all the right moves and the smooth delivery of his “vodka martini, shaken not stirred” line was hard to top.

There was something, however, about my age when I saw the Bond films with Moore that put him at the top of my list in the 1970s and ’80s. The endless combination of gadgets and arched eyebrows made him a welcome distraction in the midst of the Cold War.

I didn’t have any particular need to delve into his psychological profile or his family history, topics the more modern films have tackled. Moore’s Bond was a man of action, staving off disaster from wealthy, eccentric and egotistical villains who often had colorful, mercenary sidekicks.

Watching Moore battle with Richard Kiel, who played the impossibly strong, metal-toothed Jaws in “The Spy Who Loved Me” and “Moonraker” was pure entertainment for me as an adolescent.

The Bond movies, which started in 1962 with “Dr. No” and are still going strong 25 films later, have had many memorable opening scenes. Told to “pull out” of his mission in Austria, Bond skis away from Russians determined to kill him, but not before shooting several of them, including the lover of someone who would later become his partner in the movie.

He escapes by skiing off a cliff, where he seems to fall for an impossibly long time, kicking off his skis and flying through the air with a red backpack that seemed irrelevant until he pulls a string and a parachute with the British flag emerges, accompanied by the blaring Bond music. Moore tugs on the strings of his parachute, as he floats toward the screen.

That’s when Carly Simon’s music takes over. I suspect we’ll hear “Nobody Does it Better” in the next week or so.

Growing up surrounded by water on Long Island, I reveled in Moore’s journey into an undersea world in a car that turned into a submarine. Moore and Barbara Bach (who played Major Anya Amasova, aka Agent XXX) battled against Karl Stromberg (acted by Curd Jürgens), whose plan involved encouraging war between the United States and Soviet Union so life could begin again in the oceans after humans destroyed themselves.

Enemies in “The Spy Who Loved Me” and for much of “Moonraker,” Moore and Kiel team up at the end of “Moonraker” after Bond convinces Jaws that the villain Hugo Drax has no need for Jaws or his bespectacled girlfriend, Dolly, in his new colony of flawless humans. When Kiel speaks at the end of the movie, saying only, “Well, here’s to us” to Dolly (played by Blanche Ravalec), his voice is almost impossibly normal and tender, adding to the ongoing tongue-in-cheek nature of these high-action films.

After Kiel died in 2014, Moore said how “totally distraught” he was at the death of “my dear friend.”

While most of us never met Moore, many fans of the franchise felt a sense of loss to hear of Moore’s death. Through his seven Bond films, Moore delivered memorable lines, often with a self-confident smirk, such as when he pushed Drax out into space, encouraging him to “take a giant step for mankind.”

While all of the seven films that starred Roger Moore weren’t equally good, there were times — especially in “The Spy Who Loved Me” — where nobody did it better.

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The best way to get to know your kids, especially if they are teenagers, is to drive them and their friends, teammates and classmates. If your daughter texts you from school and asks, “Hey, Mom and/or Dad, can one of you drive three of my friends around?” don’t hesitate.

The answer, of course, can’t be what you might think. You can’t say, “Yes! Of course, that’d be great.”

You’ve got to play it cool, because the moment she catches on to the fact that you actually have ears and are listening to the conversation in the car, you’re done.

Yes, I know the temptation, after a long day, is to pick up only the kid that you’re responsible for, the one whose clothing you washed for the 10th time this week and whose teeth are straightening because you brought her to the orthodontist for yet another visit. However, the rewards from just a tad more effort more than tip the scales in favor of the few extra miles.

The key to making this supersecret spy mission work is not to let them use their phones, to take routes where cell reception is poor or, somehow, to encourage conversation. If they’re all sitting in the back seat, texting other people or showing each other pictures on one of the social networks, then the effort, time and assault on your nose aren’t worth it.

Seriously, anyone who has driven a group of teenagers around after a two-hour practice should keep a container of something that smells more tolerable nearby. When it’s too cold to stick my head out the window or when the smell becomes overwhelming, I have become a shallow mouth breather. But, again, if the conversation goes in the right direction, it’s worth it.

Put four or five or seven, if you can fit them, kids in a car, and you might get some high entertainment. If you’re quiet enough, you might learn a few things about school or your kids.

“So, Sheila is so ridiculous,” Allison recently declared to my daughter. “She only talks about herself and her feelings. Have you ever noticed that? She turns every conversation into a story about herself. I mean, the other day, she was telling me about her brother, and her story about her brother isn’t nearly as interesting as my story.”

At that point, Allison then talked about her brother and herself for the next five minutes.

Tempted as I was to ask about the story Sheila told about her brother, so I could compare the stream of stories about Sheila’s brother to Allison’s, I knew better.

The boys also enter the realm of the car social laboratory experiment after a game or practice.

“Hey, what’d you think about the movie in French?”

Wait, they watched a movie in French? Again, you can’t ask any questions or everyone retreats to their phones or remembers that the car isn’t driving itself. You have to be inconspicuous or you will be relegated to the penalty box of listening to one-word answers from your suddenly sullen sports star.

“You did well in that presentation in English?”

A presentation? English? Quiet! Quiet! You have to breathe normally and act like you’re giving all of your attention to the road.

Once the car empties and it’s just your son or daughter, you can ask specific questions. You might want to mix up some of the details, just so it doesn’t seem like you were listening carefully.

“So, you had a presentation in history?”

“No, Dad, that was in English,” your son will correct. Then he may share details that otherwise would never have made it past a stringent teenage filter.

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What keeps us young? Well, certainly eating healthy foods, exercising and sleeping are all on that list.

But there’s something else that works, too. If you can, try hanging out with a group of younger people at a party, even if the music is loud and incomprehensible.

At a recent party, I wasn’t sure what my daughter was saying, as I watched her sing every word with her eyes wide open and her hands fluttering at her sides like a butterfly’s wings.

It’s as if both of my children have sped up the needle so fast on their speech that I suspect that what’s coming out of their mouths probably started out as distinct words at some point. I’m hoping that the message they are repeating isn’t something offensive or objectionable, like, “Environmental regulation is bad, so let’s put the fox in charge of the hens at the Environmental Protection Agency. Go fox, Go fox, Go fox.” No, wait, this isn’t about politics.

A room full of children at the party, held by a family friend, made me think a bright scientist may one day figure out how to harness that energy, store it and release it at just the right time, either when someone needed to warm a house or a heart.

The next generation seems to follow a simple formula: Why walk when you can run, skip or flip, why talk when you can shout and why stay on the ground when you can challenge gravity to hold you down?

I recognize that loud parties filled with perplexing music may not be everyone’s cup of tea. The decibel level may damage hearing aids, destabilize pacemakers, or rattle fillings or dentures.

You don’t need to attend a kids party, especially if you weren’t invited to one, to share the exuberance of youth. Have you stopped your car on the way back along familiar routes to watch a T-ball baseball game, to listen to a chorus singing music you might know, or to watch a marching band trying to master John Philip Sousa while figuring out what yard line they’re supposed to be on when they reach the high notes?

All that energy begets energy. I’ve heard people talk about how their children keep them young. Imagine multiplying that, even for a day or a few hours, by however many kids are celebrating the moment in a way that doesn’t get bogged down in blinking Blackberries, a pending deadline or a need to disappear into the immobile ether of the television.

And if you’re fortunate enough, you can engage with some of the next generation in questions they raise about the world. Many of us think we are pretty knowledgeable. That may be the case, until a child asks us a question we can’t answer. Of course, we could rush to the internet to find an answer we might soon forget, or we could try to inch our way to an answer or even revisit a question we hadn’t pondered in years.

I’m sure teachers feel the same kinds of highs and lows that appear in so many other jobs. They have to discuss the Magna Carta year after year, or explain how the change in Y over the change in X represents the slope of a line.

But, then, every once in a while, a student may ask a new question that brings the material to life and gives the teacher an opportunity to learn from the student. The best answers inevitably lead to the next best questions.

Energy, insight, curiosity and joy don’t exist solely in the world of youth, but they are often easier to spot among a group of children whose joie de vivre lifts off at a party.

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There’s a part of us that wants to shed the limitations of civilization. What difference do all those arbitrary lines in society make anyway?

Say, for example, we’re standing in a grocery store and the line isn’t moving quickly enough. Then again, what line could possibly move at a speed we’d find acceptable? We look at our phones to distract us. We can watch movies we’ve seen a hundred times, check our voicemail, email, messaging service and telepathic connections, if we’ve got the right app.

The phone doesn’t offer much relief, as our boss has sent us an instant message that reads, “If you don’t bring those cupcakes back within three minutes, you will be on cupcake duty for the next six months.”

It’s our fault. We saw that lane six was probably longer than lane seven, but we picked six because we saw a headline in a magazine about Julia Roberts and we wanted to read the other headlines in a magazine that was out of stock in lane seven.

Lane six is at a complete stop as the cashier waits for the override.

“Come on!” we want to scream. “We gotta deliver these cupcakes before we lose our job!”

But we don’t scream any curse words, despite an impulse that is working its way up our spinal column. Another urge hits us. We want to jump on the conveyor belt and dance to “Cotton Eye Joe,” while kicking away the other groceries. But we don’t do that, either.

We hold back because everyone has a camera, and we don’t want to be the supermarket dancer on YouTube forever.

We consider convincing ourselves that our venting might become a way to contribute to society. Maybe other people waiting in line somewhere can laugh at us, as we act out their frustration fantasies.

But, no, we’d have a hard time going to PTA meetings or running for office if our opponent could show we didn’t have the temperament to be a leader.

We keep our composure. It’s just cupcakes, right? Then again, we still have to do our work and this means we’ll be home later than we wanted and we won’t get a parking spot near the gym tonight, which means we might have to walk an extra quarter of a mile before we run 6 miles. It’s so unfair!

Curses are echoing around our brain. We grind our teeth, tap our feet, shake our head slowly and blow our bangs off our overheated and thickly lined forehead.

We hear the words, “Come on, come on, come on,” in our head, but no one else seems to care about our agony. Oh, great, now we have to go to the bathroom, which will be difficult because as soon as we get back to the office we are serving the cupcakes at the party.

Don’t think about the need for the toilet. Oh, right, sure, that’s worked so well in the past. Why hadn’t we thought about that around, say, tax season? Sure, if you don’t think about it, taxes will just go away.

Then the curse words slipped out. We shouted them. We look around, wondering if we’ve damaged our reputation. This can be the smallest town on the planet. No one is holding a cellphone in our direction. No one seems to be waiting for us to do it again. Everyone does, however, take a step back from us.

We breathe a sigh of relief until it hits us: Two rows away is an overheated mother with three children holding onto her shopping cart. One of them — he looks like he’s about 6 years old — is staring at us without blinking. Maybe crossing that line was a mistake, as shame has replaced anger.

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