Coffee, broccoli, carrots, a pile of red onions

These times

Kirk Ericson | Nov 14, 20240

“What’s going on?” Nate asked when I entered the little grocery store he manages.

The grocery’s just down the block from my house. It was early Monday morning, and Nate was in the vegetable section, tending to the broccoli and carrots.

“I’m escaping,” I answered him.

“From what?” he asked, broccoli in hand.

I had just left the coffee shop two businesses down from the grocery store.

“Loud talkers,” I told him.

Nate laughed.

In the coffee shop

I often write my column in that Olympia coffee shop. I get a cup of coffee, sit at one of the corner tables, plug in my earbuds, turn on the music and type for however long it takes.

On that Monday morning, two people took a table 15 feet to my left about 30 minutes after I sat. I was entering the condition I must be in when those people’s voices penetrated the music flowing through my earbuds. I turned my music volume to maximum, but it wasn’t enough to block those two people’s voices. It wasn’t just the volume, I suppose. It was an aspect of their tone — one of them in particular — that penetrated my aural sanctum.

And, as usually happens, their volume forced the 10 or so other people in the coffee shop to up their volume, causing the two people to my left to escalate their volume.

It was a rights vs. a responsibility thing. Those two have the right to talk loudly, but they have the responsibility to know that when they’re in a coffee shop, they exist among other people. As the writer Fran Lebowitz of New York City says, “Pretend it’s a city.”

I wish I was a New York City native sometimes. I could have turned on those loud talkers and said, “For Christ’s sake! You’re too loud! Enough already!”

But I’m a Spokane boy.

I tried hard to tune out the voices, but when the conversation turned to the election, one of them started making comments that have been expressed a thousand times before. My aggravation mounted.

Enough. Some people think their right to be obnoxious is their obligation to be obnoxious. Those two people in the coffee shop have their rights, and I retained my rights — to leave. So, I did. I walked to the grocery store because I knew Nate was there, and he’s someone who could lift my mood.

Back to the grocery store

After Nate put the broccoli and carrots in order, he moved to a display of red onions.

“Maybe it’s not so much the loud talking,” I told Nate as I walked with him over to the red onions. “I have friends who are loud talkers. It’s just when what they’re saying is so …” I paused, trying to retrieve the right word.

“Banal?” Nate said.

“Exactly!” I said too loudly in the middle of the grocery store.

We chatted over the red onions. About 60 of them were piled into a 2-foot-by-1-foot display, and Nate was arranging them. He then stooped to put his nose about 1 foot above the pile and took a deep sniff.

“Why’d you do that?” I asked.

“There’s a bad onion in there,” Nate said.

We kept talking as he exposed the red onion pile, onion by onion, putting each one aside. This continued for several minutes.

He eventually got to the bottom layer of red onions.

“Aha!” he said, pulling out a red onion from the bottom-most layer. “Here it is.”

I’ll take some dramatic license here: Nate displayed that putrid red onion in the same way Arthur, the future king of England, displayed Excalibur after pulling it from the stone.

Nate handed me the guilty onion, which had several sickly-looking furrows along one side. I took a sniff.

“Ew. So that’s what a bad red onion smells like,” I said.

Nate smiled the smile of victory.

If you’re troubled about the state of our world, if you’re aggrieved by the people making too much noise around you, here’s something you can do. Pay attention to the people around you who are doing their good work well. Witnessing competency and happiness in action is a joy.

Email Kirk Ericson at [email protected]