The man and his wife sat listening to
a relative discuss a dinner party the
relative had recently attended. She
analyzed why the other dinner party
attendees did certain things, why their
behavior was as it was and what fears
and phobias might motivate the party
goers. The relative seemed self-satisfied
with her acuity at this analysis likening
it to dissecting frogs in sophomore bio-
logy and laughed heartily at the other
people’s idiosyncrasies, foibles and
peculiarities. Then the man recalled
hearing about a friend who routinely
took a few empty wine bottles with
him to the store to be tossed in a
dumpster rather than placed in his
recycling bin for fear the garbage man
might think he was drinking too much.
The man was about to join in the
conviviality of gossip and share this
little anecdotal tidbit when suddenly
he grew pensive and thought about some-
thing he did recently hoping no one in
general and his wife and relative in
particular would ever know about and
in a comically karmic moment or a
karmically comic moment, he couldn’t
decide which, he smiled and thought,
sometimes silence really is golden.