The Hot Dog Question

March twelfth. Here is what happened: we were minding our own business.

Simone and I had gone to the coffee shop on Sunday the way we sometimes do when neither of us has anything pressing and the light is decent and the week ahead feels long enough to warrant sitting somewhere that isn't an apartment. We had our mugs. We had the particular kind of conversation that starts as debriefing the week and becomes something else entirely, the way those conversations do. And then the couple two tables over started arguing about whether a hot dog is a sandwich.

Simone, having won the argument she didn't start.

I want to be clear: they were not arguing quietly. It was the kind of conversation that fills a room without the people having it realizing it has filled the room. And because we are who we are, Simone and I stopped our own conversation and listened for approximately thirty seconds before Simone said, 'A hot dog is not a sandwich,' with the calm of someone stating a law of physics. I said I thought there was a structural argument to be made for it. She looked at me the way she looks at things she finds genuinely baffling. We then spent the next twenty minutes on this instead of whatever we had been talking about before.

Both of us deeply invested in a stranger's argument.

The couple never resolved it, as far as we could tell. They paid, left, still talking. Simone and I sat there a while longer. At some point I noticed the afternoon had moved, the light through the front window had gone from gold to flat, and we had been there almost two hours. That's the thing about a good Sunday and a good argument: you don't notice the light changing until it already has. For the record, I still think there's a structural case. Simone has made clear she will not be revisiting this.