Unbearable Niceness of Being

My favorite card of this past year was a pale green birthday greeting with a small nosegay of daisies its only illustration, neatly drawn and pleasingly simple. "On your birthday," reads the cover, "remember: Smile and the world smiles with you." Opening, the admonition concludes, "Unless you smile too much. Then it's just creepy." I bought at least four copies of this card when I discovered it, knowing it would bring a laugh to several of my friends, young and old, mostly female.

I have a single card left, and I'm keeping it. Or maybe I'll be able to send it on its way after I expunge a few related thoughts from my system today. You see, I've been living here in Wisconsin for two months now, and I just have to say something about the way everyone is so invasively and instantaneously intimate. It's related to the card. It's related to phoniness. It's related to excess. And it has something to do with the fact that I've actually been hugged here by people to whom I was introduced with the basic and impersonal manly handshake just a brief half hour before. It's too much. There's an element of restraint amiss around here and a subsequent lack of respect. You don't invade other countries, and you don't invade other persons. You wait for an invitation or a (substantial and subtantiated) provocation.

I just started a new job, adding another fresh batch of strangers to the cookie dough of my life. On Day One, within minutes of our mutual supervisor leaving our presence, a seemingly reserved coworker told me all about a scandal that had forced him from his last job. Until then, he'd seemed relatively normal and I reasonably clear of any prejudice toward or against him. Another coworker, the next day, within mere hours of shaking my hand for the first time not only shaved my name to a diminutive as if we'd known each other since childhood but was fluently progressing from a detailed enumeration of his wife's ailments and health conditions to his own when I politely pleaded work on the other side of the building. Quite frankly, I was starting to fear I was soon going to be hearing about the size and consistency of their respective bowel movements, a little bit of personal knowledge I rather like to keep for a little later in a relationship, like right before divorce or death and also to reserve for those with whom I share either blood or bed.

Over familiarity seems incredibly pervasive here. On the many and labyrinthine bike paths of Madison, people routinely smile and wave as they pedal by in the opposite direction. At first I thought the difference was due to the fact that bicyclists here seem to favor upright handlebars to racing drops and hence came face to face more often. After a few more weeks' experience, I concluded that the upright pedaling was actually favored just to facilitate the inexorable smiling and greeting while riding! It may even be that it's one of the reasons bicycling is such a popular means of transportation here. It's a lot harder to interact personally with automotive passers-by. During running, too, it's fairly normal to greet people as you pass them: I've even seen it done in races. As for hugging, well, while it seems to be slightly out of control everywhere I've been in the last several years, here in the American Midwest, our ever-emulating children are hugging so much at the end of recess that a nice suburban school just banned it, as the "hug lines" were holding up classes!

Perhaps it's partly the fault of our language. Civilized languages have both a personal pronoun and a more formal and respectful pronoun, both connoting "you." It's nice. You acknowledge age, respect, relationships, prominence, intimacy or the desire for intimacy all in the pronoun and verb conjugations you use. You don't use the personal pronoun for "you" unless "you" agree or you are a child, basically. This allows relationships to grow and change and, what I like best, it allows us to keep a little distance until we no longer require it. Cold as it may be, I just don't really want to hug you until I like you, and I don't want you to smile and wave at me with good old Midwestern warmth as you pass me in the last tenth of a kilometer of a race. Especially not in the last tenth-kilometer.

Here in nice, friendly Madison, I'm acquiring the habit of locking my doors even during daylight hours, although I'm something of a fresh air fiend. I think I'm becoming more diligent about locking doors here than I was in Denver, where my neighborhood was actually vaguely dangerous, gangs and gunfire not totally unknown. Why lock my doors here? Because people have been entering my house uninvited! Not thieves, not salesmen, not even religious proselytizers: people I know. They knock. If there's no answer, do they go away? No. They try the door. If the front door is locked, they go around to the back door. There is no privacy here. They walk in. "Oh, there you are! I was knocking!" These are not my real friends. My real friends respect me enough to call before they come over. Stopovers are for family and next door neighbors, categories full of innocent people who are pretty much doomed to see you and your house sooner or later without your hair swept into a clip or your hairballs swept into a dustbin.

Yes. You've been knocking and hugging and smiling way too much, and I'm sorry, but it's creepy. Some day I would like to be awakened by you, maybe. Someday, it might bring a slow, soft smile to hear your footsteps entering the front hall while I'm tucked away writing upstairs. But these days would all be when we're close, when we matter to each other, when I've offered you the key to my house because I want you to walk in freely and without notice and to call me pet names like my family does. Right now, it all just pretty much freaks me out and makes me jumpy.

It may be true that we're all more interconnected that it seems and have more in common than we have differences, as most of the Presidential candidates seem intent on demonstrating as they all seek to consolidate one unanimous, indistinguishable, and meaningless position on everything, hence nothing. But does this really mean we have to instantly share the same interpersonal space? Even weak-kneed Democrats managed to sound distinct from the Republicans for a couple of months after last year's elections, when Pelosi first took the podium. But you, whom I just met, do you really automatically get to call me the same name my beloved grandfather did? Are you born with the right and desire to pull me to your ample chest and hold me there, just because we encountered each other in the checkout line? When I answer the door and say, waving my brush, "Oh, I'm busy painting," is it really altogether normal that you breeze on in, clamoring, "Let's see what colors you're using?" and charge up the staircase to the bedrooms?

The card's right. Remember. Smile and the world will smile with you. Be a friend to find a friend. But don't be an instantly intimate friend. It's sort of like coffee. What would you rather have? A cup brewed from boiling water drained slowly through aromatic and freshly ground beans, maybe with a little splash of half and half? Or a cup of microwaved instant, with Cremora? Intimacy is not meant to be instant, anymore than milk is meant to be made of coconut and palm oils and artificial scents and flavorings.