Listen, does this sound familiar?

Yesterday afternoon, I was moving slowly through the parking lot at Jewel. Stuck behind a car, I tuned into the local NPR classical music station. A cello and piano piece was playing, and within moments, the grimy, humdrum landscape changed. So much instantly felt charged with the possibility of story: that woman pushing her cart now a matriarch on the cusp of losing a son or a daughter to estrangement; that one idling in his car’s deep in contemplation of what she said last night, or what she’d...