For Best Solutions, Plan Ahead

Dear Miss Manners: I attend a jazz festival where I’ll be faced with deciding what to do with the shells from the unshelled peanuts I buy.

Since they’re biodegradable, do I just throw them on the ground and risk someone sitting on them? Maybe I should return them to the bag, but then it’s difficult to separate the shelled from the unshelled as I consume them.

Last year I ate them standing by a trash can. However, standing by a trash can in the hot sun is not something to which I look forward. Another solution is to forego the peanuts, but it’s a vice I partake of only once a year at this festival.

Gentle Reader: Miss Manners cannot bear to deprive you of your annual vice, but neither does she want to make other people suffer the consequences in a way you have made only too vivid to her.

You could go the desperate route of cocktail party guests, who go at the hors d’oeuvres only to find themselves holding a collection of toothpicks, skewer sticks and shells. In the absence of ashtrays and returning waiters, the polite ones absorb the problem (and bits of sauce) in their purses, pockets or cuffs.

But since you are planning your debacle in advance, why don’t you just bring an empty bag with you? Or ask the peanut vendor for one? Does Miss Manners have to think of everything?

Dear Miss Manners: Recently transferred from Germany to the United States, we notice that behavior and customs here are somewhat different. This does not bother us and we try to adapt to feel comfortable at home and in the office.

We were told that Americans do not really mean “come and see (visit) us” when you meet them for the first time at a business dinner or, as happened, a party - no specific date or time was mentioned. Is it appropriate not to call and invite even after exchanging names and addresses?

Gentle Reader: It is an American custom to declare that we are a plain-speaking people who are welcoming to strangers and who mean exactly what we say.

It is also an American custom to keep insisting to everyone, “Y’all come and see us, you hear?” (this being one of several regional variations), without the slightest thought that anybody so importuned would actually show up.

Miss Manners hastens to say that this does not mean that Americans are insincere. It only means that social conventions are not just for wily people. Nice, frank, hospitable people use them, too.

An apparent invitation without a date and time attached is merely an agreement in principle that further social contact might be pleasant should the opportunity happen to present itself. Even the exchange of addresses does not confirm anything but that.

However, while this means that you cannot show up on the strength of these pleasantries, it also means that a true invitation from you, would be welcomed.

Dear Miss Manners: At the direction of the tennis management at our country club, I played in a tennis flight. Afterwards, another flight member wrote me an anonymous letter saying I was not good enough to play.

What do you think of this behavior, and what would be appropriate action for club management to take?

Gentle Reader: To send an anonymous letter to anyone is despicable, but to send one to a fellow member of a club is positively unclubbable.

Miss Manners trusts that club management agrees that it cannot countenance such behavior. But, then, they don’t know who did it, did they?

So the management will have to post a notice saying that such an incident has come to their attention and warning that it must not be repeated. Naturally, no one will want to sign such a notice because it criticizes a club member.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Judith Martin United Features Syndicate