Eavesdropping

“If I marry someone under a false name, am I still legally married?”

Now, depending on the circumstance, that could be considered a rather odd question.

In fact, if you get that question from your husband after an old friend visits and calls him “Freddie old boy” all day, and you thought his name was Nelson, that is a question that should cause some alarm.

But in my case, it was my friend Jared asking the question, and I knew that this fellow screenwriter was working on a script, so I wasn’t too startled.

However, the woman sitting in the seat between us on the airplane, who didn’t know that Jared was a screenwriter, and didn’t know that Jared and I knew each other—don’t you think she should have been a tad inquisitive?

Instead, she assumed that the question was as much for her as for me, and answered with all she knew about obtaining marriage licenses, along with her guess as to what kind of background check is likely to occur prior to issuance of said license.

She never even asked why Jared would need to know such information. She was too cool for that.

I liked that about her. It made me wonder what it would have taken to rattle her.

Suppose my friend Jim were sitting in the window seat instead of Jared. He might have asked, “If I decapitated a violinist and put my head on the fiddle player’s body, would I know how to perform Tchaikovsky?”

Or Cheryl might have asked, “If I’m dating a deity, and that deity is in fact a trinity, would he be cheating on himself?”

I’d like to think that our helpful stranger would have discoursed on the limitations of muscle memory, or the technicalities of multi-dimensional courting.

I wish I was that cool.

Just my thoughts,

Sean