“Are you allowed to touch that?”, asked the man behind me at the Dunkin Donuts line, addressing the little boy who was tapping his outstretched fingers on the plastic front of the “Please enter here” sign.

The boy looked at him, and then back at the sign, and reached out to touch the sign again.

“Are you allowed to touch that?”, asked the man again, a little more firmly.

“Nooooooo?”, guessed the boy, still turned away from the man, still trying to tap his little fingers on the plastic of the sign, mesmerized by the play of light on the letters.

“I don’t think you’re supposed to touch that,” declared the man.

“But, whhhyyy?”, asked the boy.

“Because I said so,” said the man. The boy reluctantly retracted his fingers from the sign, still standing in front of it, still gazing wonderingly at the thing.

“Hey, put that down, put that down!” said the man to the boy’s older brother, a few paces away, who had just discovered and picked up a discarded bright red coffee stirrer on the floor.

“It was on the floor, put it down!” the man ordered, and I could clearly read the confusion off the older boy’s face. He couldn’t hold on to the stirrer, because the man (presumably the boys’ dad or at least some sort of paternal figure in their lives) had explicitly ordered him to drop it, but he couldn’t drop it back on the floor again because that was littering - another thing he was not supposed to do.

“Go sit down over there, both of you. Go sit down.” came the next set of marching orders. The two boys obediently scuttled over to one of the many unoccupied benches and sat down, the older one still holding on to his red stirrer, the younger one gazing around at other items of interest in the store.

“And don’t move!” declared the man, with finality.

I was bemused by this last statement - my observation of human life thus far in my 30 years of existence on this planet has convinced me of the sheer inapplicability of such commands to the pulsating creative life that embodies the human species - so I turned around to see what kind of alien being had uttered these humanly incomprehensible words.

The man was in his late thirties or early forties, medium height, slightly stocky but in a fit kind of way, with thinning black hair slicked back, accentuating his receding hairline. He was dressed like a professional on a weekend - a dark blue polo shirt tucked into his knee-length pressed khaki shorts, clean sneakers, sporty watch, and a bright yellow Nextel Motorola flip phone clipped to his leather belt.

He looked like someone in business, realty, or sales. I envisioned him in the context of his workplace, I wondered if he had a boss who told him what he was not supposed to touch or pick up, if he had a manager who told him not to move.

I wondered if he had a mom or wife (or both) who told him what not to do and when not to do them.

I wondered what happened to him between when he was a little boy himself, curious and adventurous, and now, all neat and tucked in and orderly. I wondered what life had done to this man during those many intervening years, to turn him into a safety conscious order-driven control freak, someone who firmly commands “And don’t move!” to two curious little boys fascinated by their surroundings at a sleepy Dunkin’ Donuts in a rural Massachusetts town on a sunny mid-July Saturday.

It could have been a Sunday morning at church. Same boys, same dad, same idiotic set of rules.