Pasta con a loud unwanted opinion

Since we just moved into a new neighborhood, tonight we decided to try a nearby casual Italian restaurant. It had pretty good on-line reviews and it is just a few minutes away from us, so we were sold.

We waited about 20 minutes for our table, but there was a steady stream of people coming and going. Hector noted that everyone leaving was carrying a to-go box, a warning sign that the portions were most likely going to be huge. (And they were pretty big. Leftovers for tomorrow. #winning)

We got a cute booth against the wall but the tables in the center of the room came pretty close to us. Turns out, too close. Within a minute of sitting down, I hear a woman at the closest table say blah blah "cancer" blah blah. I can't even help it, when I hear that word, it just gets all my attention. It's like when you say "treat" to a dog or "outside?" It becomes all that they can focus on. Same thing.

So now I find myself listening to this woman tell her friends that when her Dad was diagnosed with cancer, he changed his diet and did all this stuff to increase his survival odds. Sounds good. But she feels like if Sue* ever got cancer, Sue would be testing fate, smoking cigarettes - as many as she could hold, and drinking booze, and shouting "3 months? Let's make it 1 month!" Oh boy. Then I listened to this woman say "if I ever got cancer, I would jump off a bridge." At this point, I'm pretty sure she can feel me staring directly at her with a presumably disgusted look on my face. She clears her throat and says to her friends, "well because I hate to feel nauseous."

It just hit a nerve with me. Maybe because here is a woman whose life has been directly affected by cancer (her father) and she still thought it was okay to joke that suicide would be the best option. Maybe it scared me to think about what she might have seen her father go through. Maybe I was just annoyed that she was talking so loudly about a subject that is so personal to me. Or maybe I should have been minding my own business.

I still enjoyed my butternut squash ravioli but the dinner left a bad taste in my mouth.


*Not the real name, it was clearly a woman that they had been talking about when the conversation caught my ear.