Things I Know I Know

I mostly go to the coffeehouse on weekends, but sometimes when I take the day off from work, I'll go there on a weekday.

The going-to-work crowd leaves between 8 and 8:15. About nine or so, a group of older men come in to sit at two tables pushed together and drink coffee and talk. They are doctors and professors and they talk in loud voices, not as if they're hard of hearing, but as if they're using to lecturing or giving orders, as if they expect to be listened to when they say something.

They are fascinating to listen to. Once, as I was sipping my coffee and writing random notes on the other side of the room from them, they started talking about a recent case in the news, a suspicious death that the coroner had mis-reported.

One of them, a doctor I presume, said he'd once been a coroner in rural Iowa. One day, he got a call, an elderly woman who lived alone hadn't been seen for a couple of days. He and the sheriff drove to her house. They walked inside and found the woman lying on the floor in the middle of her living room.

He walked over to her, he said, knelt down and looked at her, thinking, well, it's already obvious she's had a heart attack. He checked her pulse, checked to see if she was breathing, already figuring in his head what he was going to write on the death certificate. He put his hand down so that he could turn her over and only then did he notice the blood in a pool all underneath her head. And only after he saw the blood did he notice the shotgun that had been lying right next to her all along, right out in the open, in the middle of the floor.

It turned out, the woman had committed suicide, stuck a shotgun in her mouth and blown the back of her head off.

"It's easy to miss things," he told the coffeehouse men, "when you think you already know what you're looking for."