Do you sit in a restaurant and eavesdrop on people?
Wait in an airport and barely read your book because the people next to you are so strange that you just have to listen.
Do you make up stories about these people, what kind of place they live, what their jobs are, if they have kids?
Hello, you must be a writer!
Here is our Friday What IF? The Funday juice-you-up is:
Imagine you’re in a restaurant at a small airport. Two mechanics are eating lunch. They start talking.
“I don’t know why she had to go and do that.”
“What, what’s Kathleen do?”
“She flung that chair right through the window as soon as I opened my mouth. The woman don’t know me at all.”
His friend looks at him and says, “That’s the problem, Joe. She do know you.”
What did Joe say when he opened his mouth that caused the chair to break glass and become airborne? Write it!
PS: This was a conversation I heard in a little airport near my home. I wrote it down on an index card. Always keep index cards handy. The spiral bound ones are particularly great.
About Meredith and Win Blevins
“I don’t know why she had to go and do that.”
“What, what’s Kathleen do?”
“She flung that chair right through the window as soon as I opened my mouth. The woman don’t know me at all.”
Moe looked at him and said, “That’s the problem, Joe. She do know you.”
“She know to break things and then yell at me to fix them, that’s for sure.”
“Well … you know how women can be when you go and pawn their jewelry.”
“What jewelry? You call that jewelry? It was that awful ring from her ex-boyfriend. She’s forever cursing him with every illness known to man and then some illnesses men don’t wanna’ know about! She should be thanking me for taking that eyesore outta’ her sight. You never seen an uglier thing. Instead the woman break the house and send me to the couch. Don’t she know I was doing her a favor?”
Oh, boy, there is nothing that will make furniture fly like pawned jewelry! And, of course, he was doing her a favor. What is she thinking of? Women!
xoxo — M