Overheard at the Corner Table
It’s scarf weather again — the light gray one with the coffee stain I’ve decided is decorative — and I’ve set up my little writing camp at the window table: laptop, cortado, and a to-do list written on the back of a receipt. I want to be honest with you: I came here to write, and instead I have spent forty-five minutes listening to the two gentlemen behind me argue about Bernie Sanders.
I know. I don’t do politics. That’s the rule, and it’s a good rule, and I’m mostly going to keep it. But eavesdropping in coffee shops is legal in all fifty states as far as I know, and what I overheard left me genuinely puzzled in a way I can’t stop chewing on, so you’re going to chew on it with me. Refill your mug. This stays gentle, I promise.
The two men were both upset, which is normal for politics, but here’s what caught my ear: they were upset from opposite directions and somehow about the same person. One of them said the word “socialist” the way you’d say “raccoon in the crawlspace.” The other one — and I gathered he was a Democrat, the sensible-sweater kind — didn’t like the man either. Called him a problem. And I sat there with my cortado thinking, wait, if both of you can’t stand him, one of you should probably like him, mathematically speaking.
Now, I’ll grant everybody one thing for free: the fans. Every group in the world has a loud variety that sucks the air out of the room — sports fans, sourdough people, that one essential-oils cousin we all have. The Bernie internet crowd absolutely produced its share of that species, and if your only experience of the man was somebody yelling at you in a comment section, I understand keeping your distance. I keep my distance from comment sections generally, the way I keep my distance from wasps.
But the loud fans are not the man, and the man is what confused me. Because while the gentlemen argued, I did what I do, which is look things up on my phone while pretending to answer emails. And here is what I found, stated as plainly as I can with my limited caffeine:
He believes in owning things. Property, businesses, all of it. He’s said so for fifty years. He believes people should start companies and compete and make money. What he adds — and this is the whole thing, as far as I can tell — is that the people who end up with the very most, the ones whose fortunes were built on everybody else’s daily work, ought to put a meaningful share back in so the roads and schools and hospitals keep working for everyone. Because they benefit most when the whole town does well. That’s the entire scary idea. My aunt Ruth ran her household on that exact principle and nobody ever called her a radical. Whoever fills the biggest plate helps with the biggest share of dishes.
I texted a friend who’s better at history than me, and she said we’ve mostly been trained to jump at one word — “socialism” — and that the training goes back generations, to a time when fear of that word kept a lot of very expensive machinery running. I’m not qualified to unpack all of that. But I do know what it feels like to flinch at a word before I’ve checked what’s actually inside it. I do it with “moist.” It has never once helped me.
Here’s the part where I stopped pretending to answer emails entirely, though. Because the raccoon-in-the-crawlspace gentleman — the conservative one — spent a good ten minutes complaining about what health insurance costs his business. He owns a shop. Two employees he clearly loves. And the premiums, he said, eat him alive every single year, and every year he has to choose between raises and coverage.
Friend. Sir. I wanted so badly to turn around.
Because the man you were calling a raccoon has spent his whole career trying to take that exact expense off your books. That’s what the health care idea actually is when you unwrap it: no small business owner ever again spending her Sunday nights comparing plans, or losing a good employee to a bigger company because it has a better benefits package, or skipping her own coverage — I know boutique owners who do this — so her staff can keep theirs. Every café I’ve ever consulted for, every little shop downtown with the hand-lettered sign, carries that weight. Imagine setting it down. Imagine what a person could pay, build, hire, or simply breathe with that off the ledger. The countries our small businesses compete against set it down decades ago.
I don’t know how everything gets paid for and I won’t pretend to. Smarter people than me argue about that, some of them two tables over. I’m just a woman with a scarf reporting what she heard: two people who agreed on almost every problem, sharing a hatred of one of the only people addressing their list, because of a word one of them was taught to fear before either of them was born.
The gentlemen left, still friends, still arguing, and I hope they come back — the argument was better than most podcasts, and they both smelled good, which I appreciate in a stranger. But if either of you is reading this: check the crawlspace before you call the exterminator. Sometimes it isn’t a raccoon at all. Sometimes it’s just an old man from Vermont who thinks the dishes should be shared.
Stay clean, stay kind, stay caffeinated. And tip your barista — trust me, we regulars hear everything from these window tables.
