How You Doing?

a reprise of dispatch #1, holding dispatch #106's place

Note bene - this is, I think, my first dispatch written two years ago. I’m in the Dominican Republic lying on the beach so just threw this in. If you aren’t seeing it then I figured out how to post on my holiday which I really don’t think I’m going to do even if I do figure it out. Because holiday.

No one knows what is going on in your little brain pan. How would they? And usually when they ask there is the implicit hope that you won’t really tell them. Because then they might have to do something and I don’t know about you (see?) but I don’t want to have to do something. Not today anyway. Mostly, in the hope of being both honest and yet not burdensome when asked how I am I say ‘good enough’. That is unorthodox enough to cause most to stop and say ‘huh?’ or ‘huh!’. To me ‘good enough’ means that I can make it through the current days without faltering or without seeming to falter. I can raise my gaze above the ground and maybe even all the way up to the tops of trees. If I’m not up to that I might shrug and say ‘as well as can be expected considering it is the end of days’. Not to strangers mind. I don’t think that’d help anyone at the grocery checkout counter. And if I’m feeling really great about life I say ‘if I were any better I’d be twins.’ Which makes no sense but poetic.

I am fully cognizant with these ritualistic askings and responses. I understand that no information need really be imparted, that it is just the grease of human intercourse. Every day I take Bella, a very social border collie/native dog mix out for a stroll on our very social street. Unless we’ve had a big nor’easter like last night, I encounter the same six or so people. We talk, as people do, about the damn weather, crazy drivers, bear sightings, and how the older than us folk on our road are doing. “Have you seen Ethel and Fred?” one might ask. “Nope. Driveway too icy for them.” another will offer. There is one person I walk with and we do talk about real things; the dream we had the night before, the friends that are in trouble, the worry about our own health, the hope that the merlins will return this spring, and the timing of getting our seedlings started. Sometimes I feel like telling the others more, frightening all of us out of our highly curated lives, by saying “I’m taking a plane to Gaza and chaining myself to a tank.”, or “I don’t know about you but I’m considering having MAID rather than go through nine months of election news from south of the border.” But I don’t

The other reason I use the expression ‘good enough’ is because of the over curated lives business. I’m sure this isn’t helped by social media, but in all fairness I think it has been happening for awhile. Things appear on the surface to be either complete perfection (my grandchildren, my renovations, my trip to Prague) or in complete ruin (my sleep, my crazy busyness, my social obligations). Is this possibly true? Well, for me it isn’t. Sometimes I’m too busy and sometimes I’m lying on the couch watching hours of YouTube videos about building a miniature Howl’s Moving Castle out of garbage. My grandchildren exhibit the usual mix of brilliance and disaster, and I can’t afford renos or trips to Prague which is actually fine with me.

And so communication becomes difficult, as we become more and more adept at prevaricating, exaggerating and minimizing. It spreads to not just those for whom after all we owe no answers, our acquaintances, on to those that we are intimately connected with. We don’t want to alarm our friends with the depth of our sorrows, or cause them the pain of envy when we do have something truly wonderful going on. Perhaps it is an aging thing, perhaps, as mentioned earlier, it is an end of days thing, but the sharing of feelings must be titrated – we are all carrying so much now. Sometimes I go under water and scream. But the fishes.

It’s a wonder when you think of babies being murdered and the major ocean currents changing directions that we don’t all go about screaming help help help from morning to night. But we don’t and it wouldn’t be helpful, not to mention how exhausting it would be. We are all tired enough already.

And so we ask each other politely how it goes, and pray no one really answers.