Conversation Overheard At the Eye Clinic Waiting Room

Elderly man, late 70's or early 80's, wearing a blue workingman's coat and sporting a hearing aid talking to a woman of his age in a beige jacket with pink roses, also with hearing aid.

"Did you ever dream you would have a phone in your own house?" she says with surprise.

"Whenever I needed a phone I would go over to Charlie's."

"Or a candy store where they had a pay phone." She stops, turns the page on an old magazine.

"Charlie Sheen looks pretty good for his age," the man says. Surely Charlie would be pleased to know that an old man, hard of hearing and waiting for an eye doctor, thinks he's hanging in there.

"The father?" she responds.

"What father? Oh, Martin Sheen. No, the son."

"Which son? He has two."

"Two?"

"Charlie Sheen and...," she stalls. No way, I think, she knows the other. " And Emilio Estevez."

"The son, Charlie."

Long pause. She continues through her magazine.

"Banana stuffed cinnamon french toast."

The man perks up. "Sounds good, All those good things together."

"What do they stuff in the bananas?" She is clearly puzzled by this. She goes on. "Diet foods that make you thin."

"What?"

It says diet foods that make you thin. There's also diet foods that make you fat."

"Mr. Katz," the nurse calls. I get up from the coach to see the opthamologist, never to discover which diet foods work and which don't.