connection
Driveway Conversations
When my sister and I were teenagers growing up in Honolulu, Hawaii, our next door neighbor, Pammy, was our very best friend. She was a couple years older than us, she went to a different high school, and her family dynamics were different from ours, but we were very close.
The three of us had hours’ long conversations sitting at the end of our driveway. The asphalt driveway wasn’t uncomfortable at all; rather, it comfortably supported our friendship for years. Our conversations varied but we never ran out of topics to discuss, and you can be sure that boys figured into those teenage talks from time to time.
I still have driveway conversations with my neighbors in a suburb of Seattle, Washington. Sometimes those conversations look more like glancing over the fence, seeing a neighbor, and chatting with them to get caught up with our households’ lives. Another “driveway conversation” may look like someone stopping at the front of our house while my husband and I are doing yard work, and us neighbors asking about each household’s latest travels, accomplishments, or illnesses. After all, my husband and I, and many of our neighbors, are in the 50-80 year old age group.
Connection is what counts and that connection extends to monitoring each others’ homes while travels are taking place, taking care of the neighbors’ garbage bins during said travels, or intervening when a vicious dog attacks our very closest neighbors’ dogs. And when that vicious dog is noted as being on the loose, texting each nearby neighbor to make them aware of the danger. (Yes, that happened within the past couple weeks.) But in order to have the neighbors’ contact information we have to care enough to befriend the neighbors and share our primary contact details with them.
All of us have experienced pandemic-imposed isolation so we are intimately aware of how uncomfortable that disconnect can be. Remembering that discomfort, I can’t help but make driveway friends, supermarket checker friends, restaurant server friends (the latter two types being Glimmer Friendships) wherever I go. Won’t you join me?
Glimmers of Friendship
A good friend of mine calls the above types of connections Glimmers.
I wonder where you experience glimmers? I am quite certain that not a day has gone by when I am in public that I haven’t been involved in an accidental meeting with someone, or several someones. Just ask my husband…there isn’t an elevator – or a store checkout counter – where I have not reached out to a stranger for that very short glimmer of friendship.
You don’t have to bug the heck out of someone to make a connection wherein they are frantically trying to get away from you – not in the least. All that is needed is a smile, a kind word, a compliment about their sparkly boots – the latter occurring just a couple weeks ago – or even just wishing a stranger a positive day of sorts.
Give it a try. You just might have made that stranger’s day with that accidental meeting’s mini conversation.
And may I add, I hope someone does the same for you someday soon that will make you feel better than you did just moments before.
AND TRUST ME, THAT’S NO ACCIDENT.
Thirty Second Friendships
I’m the person who waves, but I’m also the person who waves back. I just can’t help myself, especially when a young child is concerned.
Ever since I became a grandmother back in 2017, I can’t resist waving and talking to a youngster while said youngster is accompanied by their parental unit – I’m just so enamored by kiddos. Caveat: prior to attaining grandparenthood, I just couldn’t be bothered, but I am a reformed woman.
But it’s not just the youngsters with whom I engage; I can’t help but engage all age groups in friendly conversation. I crave the connection and I am shameless in my efforts to satisfy that craving.
Maybe you’re among the many who hope beyond all hope that when you encounter the stranger that is me, no conversational effort will be required on your part. Sorry to disappoint you, but if you’re in my sights, I’m reaching out to become your 30-second friend.
BE WELL. STAY WELL, Y’ALL.
Small Kindnesses
A poem by Danusha Laméris, 2019 (bold highlights made by this blogger):
I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs to let you by.
Or how strangers still say “bless you” when someone sneezes, a leftover from the Bubonic plaque. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes when you spill lemons from your grocery bag, someone else will help you pick them up.
Mostly we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot, and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile at them and for them to smile back.
For the waitress to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder, and for the driver in the red pickup truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other now. So far from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here, have my seat,” “Go ahead – you first,” “I like your hat.”
