Just a wave has come to mean so much more
When I was about 5, my friend, Debbie, and I instituted a regular ritual while traveling in the back seat of her parents’ car. We would face out the rear window and, smiling with expectant sociability, wave at the drivers following behind us. If they smiled and waved back, we would pronounce them “nice” and glow in the warmth of a brief but successful social occasion. If they ignored us or, worse, issued expressions of annoyance, we would puzzle over their resistance to our wholehearted affability.
I’ve thought a lot lately about these unsolicited attempts at engagement.
During frequent drives down the dirt access road in an eastern Connecticut preserve, I have savored the little communications that drivers often exchange as one pulls over to let the other pass: the raised hand in appreciation; the acknowledging nod; on a particularly good day, a sustained smile or two. One day, three — count them, three! — cars approached from the opposite direction, occasioning three opportunities for either manifesting the courtesy or responding to it.
Like many people, I have always been buoyed by the brief, social interactions that verify the possibilities of social bonds — a confirmatory gesture, an unsolicited offer, a subtle signal of support. But now it’s different. Now, what used to enhance the day makes it possible to survive it. Now, almost anything may be construed as an occasion for celebration.
Similarly, nostalgia is on an express train from the recent past to the abruptly arrived-at present. Could it have been only a few months ago that I walked in uptown Manhattan without a thought of contagion? That I sat in a tiny, tightly packed theater at a performance of haunting intensity and felt cradled and warmed by the shared reactions of the audience? Eras are now measured in months, even weeks past. “Back in the day” really is just a matter of days.
Parking my car by the side of the road in that eastern Connecticut preserve, I start off with my dogs on an hour hike. I have walked here since its establishment, always appreciatively, always with zeal. Resistant to sentimental notions of Mother Nature, I ruefully realize that the same natural world that offers distraction, solace and opportunities for wonder is the world that has let loose this brutally consuming virus. Even so, more than ever, I crave the enlivening gratification of senses that only such environments can provide.
Frogs charm me with personas both cute and avuncular. A garter snake indicates its proximity with rustling sounds; appearing, it glistens in ribbons of olive and chartreuse.
Every strike of a woodpecker’s beak taps out an announcement of life forces unstopped. The persistent sound evokes another memory — an adolescent me in her father’s funeral procession, observing teens on the street with radios pressed to their ears as they move to the latest tunes. Life goes on, I realized then with a newly bruised understanding of the cliché. It is a fact that causes both affront and comfort.
Likely, directives will soon begin the phasing out of radical physical distancing. Circumscribed modes of social gesture, like the encapsulated communications offered by one driver to another, will recede in importance. They shouldn’t. We have always needed them. We will need them again.
Elanah Sherman lives in Norwich.