On a bench or sipping coffee, take time to listen

A lot of attention is being given, by the news media in particular, to town hall-style meetings conducted by various elected officials who say their aim is to find out what's on our -- voters, taxpayers, citizens -- minds.

Some of these meetings, as you have seen and heard, have been a mite unruly. And guess what? Elected officials really don't want to hear from raucous, headstrong, belligerent constituents after all. Matter of fact, they don't know what to make of the angry folks who might have been part of the silent majority in the past, but now want somebody -- anybody -- to listen to them.

Which leads me to this week's inspirational message to politicians everywhere: If you want to know what's on our minds, sit on the metal bench outside the public restrooms at Wal-Mart. And listen. Don't try to impress anyone with your official credentials. Folks sitting on these benches aren't impressed by "Congressman" this or "Senator" that. But there's something about sitting just feet away from the cash registers that take millions of our dollars every year. It's like taking a brain laxative: Pretty soon you have to say something, ready or not.

Yes, this past week found me sitting on one of the metal benches while my wife was off in another part of the store. And everyone else who wound up sitting on the benches had something to say.

Everyone had a weather observation.

That's OK. We all deal with the weather. Some of the benchwarmers compared notes about flooded county roads, even though it had been days since the latest deluge. You can't go wrong talking about the weather, which is why it is such a popular topic around benches.

Last year was terrible for homegrown tomatoes.

I've had this obsession about finding some tomatoes, homegrown or not, that match my memories of the bright red Big Boys or whatever was on sale when I was a boy in the Ozarks over yonder. Either my taste buds are well beyond their use-by date, or something has happened to tomato hybridization that has sucked all flavor right out. I'm looking for tomatoes with high acid content, enough to make canker sores in your mouth if you eat as many tomatoes as I would like to eat, if they were fit to eat.

Maybe my memory is faulty. Maybe my taste receptors are on the blink. The plain fact is I can't find a steady source of tasty tomatoes. And now I know, thanks to the comfort of a steel bench outside the Wal-Mart restrooms, that last year was a lousy tomato year. End of story.

Sitting in one of the waiting rooms at Saint Francis Medical Center's Heart Hospital the other day, I heard from another waiting-room occupant how bad things are in Cairo, Illinois. This was from a lifelong Cairo resident who remembers the town's glory days as a thriving commercial center, as well it should be at the confluence of the mighty Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Cairo, I was told, doesn't even have a grocery store. Folks have to drive to Mounds or Charleston or Cape Girardeau to find food. But the word is out that a new grocery store is coming to Cairo in August. This would be good, because it would make for handier grocery shopping, and it would also create much-needed jobs in town. So that was good news, which just goes to show that not everyone who sits on a metal bench or in a waiting-room chair is all gloom and doom.

But if you really want to know what's what, you will take full advantage of coffee groups and beauty shops. One is for men. The other is for women, even though hair salons these days serve men and women. And coffee. I'm not interested in a discussion of the political correctness of this. It's just the way things are. And if you want to take the nation's temperature, go for the coffee and the perms.

A couple of mornings a week I have coffee at Sand's Pancake House on Kingshighway in Cape Girardeau. That's where the lowdown on just about everything is shared. Big news last week was learning that Sand's, which has been a Kingshighway fixture longer than most of the regulars can remember, is moving in a couple of months. Which goes to show that once in a while you actually hear something you didn't already know and is actually of interest to you. There's a word for that: news.

Almost anywhere folks congregate -- in many cases these are folks you don't know and probably will never see again -- the subject of politics rears its knobby head. At the first utterance of "Trump" you can make a choice: stay and listen or flee and keep your blood pressure in check. I haven't met a true-blue red-blooded American patriot yet -- and aren't we all? -- who doesn't have strong feelings about the president of the United States.

Well, here's the point of all of this. If politicians really want to know what we think, stop trying to convince us to re-elect them and start listening.

As for everyone else, keep yammering. How else are we going to know what's really going on?

Joe Sullivan is the retired editor of the Southeast Missourian.