#Microblog Monday 358: Eavesdropping
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Until I read this New Yorker article, I hadn’t realized how much I missed eavesdropping and how it wasn’t present in my world for the last 16 months. The random things you overhear while you’re waiting somewhere or sitting too close to people in a restaurant or passing on the street.
As it says, “The best lines provide several little thrills at once: a sketch of character, a hint of story, the joy of feeling like you understand the rest. Like a Norman Rockwell painting, they’re obvious yet mysterious, conveying too much and too little in a single moment.”
More than seeing people or eating in restaurants, I miss coming home with little snippets, like the first date A Half Baked Life and I overheard between a man and his date, explaining how he shot himself in the foot (in the bathtub!) to collect insurance money but now he is missing a toe.
What are things you’ve overheard?
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7 comments
I love this. I usually don’t remember snippets I hear, but this one was unforgettable.
In a hotel lobby in Sweden in 2017, I heard a man say filled with incredulity, in the midst of a conversation in Swedish, “alternative facts!” and he and his friends feel about laughing.
My favorite accidental spectator show was on a train in Italy in 1997. My sister and I, with our very minimal Italian, were trying to follow the conversation between the conductor and the 4 people (middle aged adults, dressed nicely in casual clothing who appeared to be able to pay the fare) who had no tickets and didn’t want to pay the fine for not having tickets. It was quite lively.
Not as good as shooting oneself in the foot for insurance money though. That’s a big red flag waving at you from across the table! 😱
I love to eavesdrop too. 🙂 I don’t always remember a lot of what I overhear, but here’s one incident I remember: early on in our marriage (late 1980s/early 1990s), my parents came to visit us and we spent a few days in Niagara-on-the-Lake, a lovely little town in wine country near Niagara Falls, about 1.5-2 hours from Toronto (well worth a visit!). We had a good deal to stay at the (very swanky & expensive) Prince of Wales Hotel, and went to the lounge there after attending a play for drinks & snacks. My dad leaned across the table, nodded his head and said, “Isn’t that the guy from The Fabulous Baker Boys over there?” Sure enough it was Beau Bridges, along with a young Canadian actor I didn’t know by name but recognized from TV commercials, and two women. We couldn’t hear everything they were saying, but Bridges seemed to be giving some career advice to the younger actor. In one of the snippets I heard, he warned the younger guy to beware of Hollywood. Probably good advice!
That is a CRAZY thing to overhear! So fun. I do like eavesdropping and sometimes when Bryce and I have been out to lunch or dinner I get real quiet and it’s because I’m listening in to something fascinating. For the life of me I can’t remember a specific thing recently, but I do have a talent for overhearing students in the hallways or outside swearing. Once we were doing a walk outside for Attitude For Gratitude, an event to gather dry goods needed for the local food shelf around Thanksgiving, and a kid near me said something with F*CK real loudly and I turned around and he didn’t realize (gasp) a teacher was nearby and freaked out. So I walked with him and was like, “Give me FIVE things you are thankful for that are OTHER F-WORDS!” And he did… Hahahahaha.
I feel like the 2020/21 equivalent of this is hearing things in the background of virtual school. My first grader had some classmates with…lively homes. The most memorable for me was a woman who was on the phone discussing her “date with a young one at the cider mill – I’m his first cougar!” 😳
I do miss those random snippets of conversation. I still pick them up here (in the grocery store or if I’m walking behind students on campus). But the shooting a toe off for insurance $$$! That is a fabulously crazy story!
The first thing that comes to mind is sitting next to a woman in the waiting area of the DMV (dept of motor vehicles for anyone not familiar). She was on her cell phone telling her boyfriend in detail about how she liked some nastiness he’d done to her the night before. I had to get up and walk away. I wanted to go home and bathe. xo