Two people smiled at me this morning as I walked down my street. The first was a balding elderly man who was leaning out of his ground floor window to water his flower boxes. I wanted to stop to tell him how much I appreciate his plants, but I didn't. He glanced up as I passed and gave me a half-smile, which I returned.
As I moved quickly past, I was surprised to realize how much that brief bit of friendly human contact meant to me. People don't smile at strangers here. People don't smile much at strangers in NH either, and it would normally never occur to me to want them to, but I'd been struck by the
gleaming friendliness of a server at a bakery earlier (I'd gone on a quest to get a cronut--New York's latest food obsession. Of course, I was too late.). Faced with his sunniness, I'd realized that I don't smile much anymore--and not for good reasons.
I was never a Cheshire cat, but the guardedness and rush and faux-sophistication of the city has been rubbing off on me. The heckling from homeless men at the subway entrance--"C'mon, baby, what's the matter? Smile!"--doesn't really help.
Ten paces past the flower boxes, a few men, apparently movers, were standing in the sidewalk by their truck. My look-at-the-ground-and-get-past-the-men-without-getting-their-attention mode kicked in, but first I briefly made eye contact with one. He smiled at me--a warm, kind, undemanding smile. I smiled back even as I returned my eyes to the sidewalk and quickened my pace. Enough pleasant interaction with strangers for one day.
