Dialogue Exercise

I had about 15 minutes before the service started, so I skittered across Boylston and into Finagle a Bagel to grab at least something to break my fast. With about 13 minutes to spare, I positioned myself in a corner of the outdoor patio from where I could monitor the flow of people into the sanctuary at Trinity Church. My monitoring was rather disrupted, however, by the heated argument between a couple seated immediately adjacent to me. Mildly intrigued, I listened in.

“C’mon—it doesn’t even rain in California,” insisted the man, perhaps a Californian.

“Whaddya mean? You can’t say that—I mean… Califohnia’s got so much, so much… latitude that it’s got like fouhteen different climate zones!” countered the woman, obviously not Californian from her inability to pronounce the letter “r.”

“Well, anything above San Francisco… what the hell! They can just go and be Oregon. After all, I’m from SoCal.”

His interest in the argument was waning quickly.

“Just a little bit of a minah detail theyah, huh? Like I was saying, Califohnia’s got so much latitude that you can’t just generalize like that!”

She was not hiding her pride in tromping her companion’s logic. He simply glared at her, most likely starting to tune her out at this point.

“OK, yes, you are right. Forgive me for generalizing. Again.”

Evidently, this was a routinely picked bone between the two of them. At least his tendency to over-generalize; I’m not sure about the meteorological component of the “discussion.” I didn’t stick around to find out, either, at this point. Somehow it was already five minutes before the 9:00 service was to start, and I had more pressing issues.