Brief Encounter

Sure, naturally you assume I'm referencing famed British director David Lean's early 1945 film Brief Encounter, an adaptation of a Noel Coward play about a married mother's passionate but doomed tryst with a stranger. But I'm not.

The brief encounter I'm referencing took place at a grocery store. I was standing in line, the man ahead of me in a loose gray tank top, shorts and sandals. He was, by my estimation, in his mid or late 30s. He was purchasing a pack of beer. As we were waiting in line he perused the magazine covers. On the cover of the National Enquirer the headline read: "$100 MILLION AT STAKE: Michelle's SECRET DIVORCE FILE!" sandwiched between two grimacing photos of the president and his wife. The man shifted his pack of beer to one arm, pointed at the magazine cover, and said to me, "Now that would make my day." Before I could respond the man's significant other called him over to another line.

I was left to ponder why the failed marriage of a president would make this man's day. I mean, hate his politics all you want, but to revel in the dissolution of a  loving union seemed to me to be a whole new level of lazy, passive ignorance. Obviously we were both aware that the National Enquirer story was a joke. But the man next to me in line was happy to idly wish that the president of our nation might go through a scandalous, acrimonious divorce. "Just so long as the man is unhappy," is basically what this guy said, and I can't relate to that kind of personal vitriol. Criticize the man's professional performance if you must, but how could any man who has ever felt love wish it torn away from another human being?