for aunt mae.

Sitting in the sunshine sipping my americano, savoring my oatmeal, and reading some David Sedaris, two gentlemen carry their coffees and an inappropriate conversation out the door and into my space. It's a conversation about death, which isn't the inappropriate part. I started to get offended when they began to gravel on about the details of how the woman was killed, sigh big heavy sighs, voice multiple "I just can't believe it-s", name drop people that had contacted them knowing they knew her, and rehash, yet again, the specifics of why she had no chance, and what she would have been - "broken back, ribs, a complete vegetable" - had she survived.

They finished their loud obtrusive talk and then got behind the closed doors of their respective vehicles, which would have been the respectful place to have been having the conversation in the first place.

As they drive away, the woman next to me looks over with tear filled eyes and says, "My daughter was hit by a drunk driver and thrown out of her vehicle at the age of twenty-six, leaving three babies behind." I attempted to be as comforting as a stranger can be, marveling at how easily a lack of social awareness can inadvertently ruin a person's morning. They let a stink bomb fall out of the hole in their pockets, carelessly crushed it under their feet on their way to their trucks in the midst our rain scented spring morning, drove away before the stench reached their noses, and left us to bask in the stenches' wake.

Obliviousness is such a disappointing aspect of life.

Moments later, a kind cross-dressing gentleman enters our space, takes a chair, and asks if we mind if he smokes a cigarette. She and I both reply to his thoughtfulness with a request that he just move the chair where he was about to take a seat to the other side, in the direction of the breeze. He obliges, and we thank him for his consideration.

"It's sometimes easier to see clearly outside," he says.

Considerate cross dressing strangers smoking cigarettes as the second hand smoke blows with the breeze saying poignant and thoughtful sentences out of the blue: such a wondrous aspect of life.