We still live in a good society. I keep forgetting this and life keeps reminding me.

I have a younger friend who graduated with honors and with a major in Philosophy. I liked him just for that. It sure beats a major in”Psychology,” or one in “Management.” Incidentally, I know that some of my readers know that I used to teach from a “Management Department.” My excuse is that I tried very hard never to teach whatever you think is “management” and that I pretty much succeeded overall. (This story will have digressions. It’s one of those days. Go with the flow.)

Anyway, my friend takes care of several coffee shops. He has become the owner’s right hand by din of being hard working and just plain reliable. Two things happened to him as a result. The first is political. My friend went to the University of California at Santa Cruz, where Stalinists communists are considered conservative. So, of course, he used to be kind of a left-winger. (That would be the honest kind, the kind that does not knowingly make false statements.) Nowadays, though, the closer the he gets to the books, to the actual accounting of the coffee shops, the more he moves to the political center. Who ever said philosophy is “useless?”

The other thing that happened to my friend through his work is that he became a coffee connoisseur. One day that he inquired about a present for me, I said, “ Surprise me with coffee.” He did. He brought me a small quantity of a variety I had never heard about. “How did you like it? “ he asked two days latter.

Well, I stopped lying – except in emergencies – at about the time I stopped lying to women. And, incidentally, there was never much reason to believe that I ever, ever deceived a single woman. Mostly, they listened to my lies smilingly because they liked the poetry of them.

At any rate, I replied to my friend that his gift coffee did not paint my particular town red. He had this superb response I have not been able to get out of my head for days now; he said that that particular coffee was “divisive.” I am so lucky! I live in a society so peaceful, so prosperous, so fulfilling that here, expensive coffee can be considered divisive!