You want to know what to me feels like having to sleep on wet wool blankets? Doing research, that’s what. There’s no getting ’round it, it’s just plain tiresome, and I really hate having to do it.

Except this time. For this column, the research was way, way cool because I conducted it in my most favorite locations anywhere on earth — restaurants. Any restaurant. Because I could eat while I was doing it and because I could legally eavesdrop on people, because I had to, for the research you see.

So, equipped with my palm-sized secret spy decoder tape recorder, I charged off into the vast unknown, prepared to sacrifice my all for this column. My job is my life.

I exaggerate just a speck. I do that. The place to which I charged really wasn’t unknown, or even vast. It was downtown. I selected a semi-local eatery, sat and pretended to read a newspaper. (You can always espy a top-notch undercover researcher — they’re the ones pretending to read a newspaper.)

But I was really eavesdropping. I heard a mother at the next table casually saying, “Hey! No karate in the restaurant,” to one of her young. Now when did mothers begin to drone that rule of good manners at their kids in restaurants? (And when did kids begin to do that in restaurants?)

What happened to “stop playing with your food, get your elbows off the table, and stop those deafening suck/slurpings with your straw” issues? Forbidding karate while dining? I sure never heard that in my time. But that’s probably because karate hadn’t yet been invented. Martial arts for us was not such an exact science or even a phrase; when confronted by trouble, you ran or begged.

“Nope,” said another mother pleasantly one day at a lunch booth next to mine, “You most certainly may not get married. You’re only 12. Now finish your meal. Money is tight this week, and I don’t want to waste it by having to send back your food.”

Now, call me shallow, but did she seem more concerned with the waste of food than her pubescent’s wanting to be united in holy or otherwise wedlock? I mean, I’m as against starvation or the flagrant waste of money as the next person, but that mother never rippled an eyelash at her still-in-braces junior-high daughter’s request to be espoused. (The espouse was nowhere in sight.)

It wasn’t too many years back, (that’s a lie) when I was being dinner time droned at myself, only I was not denied matrimonial bliss at 12. (That came eight years later when I told the folks I was definitely marrying Mongo.) Back then, I was advised to finish my meals because there were starving Chinese or Armenians or some other nationality somewhere out there who apparently, according to my know-it-all parents, went about coveting my mashed turnips.

That’s why I had to finish, not because it was wasting money to not eat every scrap. Talking about money at the table, you see, was considered poor manners. If you desired a raise in allowance, for example, it was deemed unseemly to ask for it at the dinner table. Better it be done later at a more proper time, after dinner, preferably when the allowance-dispenser was a little into his after supping cups. The prospects for success were far more favorable that way.

And one evening at a fast-eatery I heard, “Now look. Mom’s a little stressy tonight. And when Mom gets stressy and you act like a bunch of bone-nosed savages, you know she’s apt to break your little butts.” Mrs. Stressy’s kids, having obviously heard that empty threat frequently, glanced over at her Stress’s, right” expressions, and without missing a beat, went back to busily demonstrating their considerable behavior problems for the other diners.

Overheard from a table at another food establishment where a family was having a goodbye party for their daughter who was off to college: “Honey, honey, we’ll miss you so much,” said the misty-eyed dad. “You’ll have a wonderful time.”

“Yeah, yeah, sure Dad,” was the bored answer, delivered in the same tone kids use when you remind them to be home by 10 p.m.

The commands I discharged at our progeny while dining were as follows: “Please, I must insist you do not shove peas up your nose in public,” or “Really, I have little desire to see your food being ground up in your mouth. Please consider screaming at your brother after your mouth has emptied,” or “If you feel compelled to belch so repeatedly while we are eating, you may leave the table and indulge that practice in the garage,” or “If you persist in propping yourself up on the table by your elbows, I shall be forced to knock them away with the gravy ladle,” or “It is getting so tiresome having to remind you every single day to remember to bring the food to your mouth, and not your mouth to the food,” or “Your father and I would so appreciate it if you’d cease bashing your brother on his skull with that salad bowl. It is made of a special sort of glass, and are no longer available,” or “For the 20th time this month, you must stop putting that jar of caterpillars on the table during meals. Doesn’t it occur to you that no one can eat when you do that? Be a little more considerate. They’ve been dead for weeks.”

I’m telling the truth about all this, I swear. Want to hear just a couple more really good eavesdrops? At a tea room: “OK, OK, if you like really wanna know what I wanna do with my life, it’s like I wanna sleep as much as I can, and when I wake up I like wanna play games on my phone, and I wanna eat fries with ketchup and smoke a little weed, and then like I wanna go back to sleep. OK, you got that? Watcha so upset for? You axt me. Y’happy now?”

Come to think of it, doing research isn’t all bad.

LC Van Savage is a Brunswick writer.