A Good Overhear

Don't stop drinking coffee, kids!

My wife and I went to the coffee shop. This happens every day. We ran into a friend. This happens some days. We started talking to him. Out of the corner of my eye I saw two guys also having coffee, also talking. I had to get up to go to the bathroom and passed by their table and caught just a tiny fragment of something that one guy said. On the way back I caught a fragment from the other guy. This is difficult to support but I had a strong feeling that I was witnessing the angry dissolution of a long friendship. What was clear was that one of the two men was dominant over the other, and that the one who was not that guy had been storing up the courage to rebel fully against the arrangement. I had never seen either of them before and will likely never see either of them again. What was happening was none of my business. But also it is my business to take that sad seed and plant it and then put the flower that results in a pot and put that pot in the window.

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OBJECTS IN THE MIRROR

Phil had a friend also named Phil but this friend was his better in every way and it ate at him. Phil, the friend, Phil the Greater, had been an actor in his youth on a popular sitcom and then moved seamlessly, it seemed, into movie roles, first as a male ingenue, then as a leading man, where he earned the admiration of critics, secured more than a few award nominations, and did decent box office. At forty, he quit the business and devoted himself to the international pro bono plastic surgery practice of his wife, herself a former model, who traveled to distant lands fixing birth defects. Phil saw him when he was back in town, always remarked how tan and rested he looked, was always waved off with the same explanation and disclaimer: “What relaxes me is making other people’s lives better.” Implied: You should try it sometime. But Phil, Phil the Remarker, Phil the Lesser, could not, not sometime, not anytime. He had a declining architecture practice and a wife who was too beautiful for him by far and kids who seemed smart enough to one day go to college and a pain in his ankle that he was fairly certain was terminal foot cancer and above it all, literally, hovering there, he had doubts about himself, a cloud swollen with the nagging fear that he was somehow destined for a chute rather than a ladder. He didn’t even play the lottery anymore, so certain was he that he would lose. Instead Phil sat in fancy bars Phil paid for and smiled at anecdotes that were by any measure charming. It reminded him of something he had asked once after a lecture back in graduate school. The speaker had been explaining how satellite cities can thrive. Phil had raised his hand and been brought a wireless microphone. “Yes,” he said. “Simple question. Can borrowed size be as simple as seeing a skyline across a river?” [©2026 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas]