I opened the front door this morning to the glorious, too-often-a-stranger sun, prepared to skip down my front steps and trot the half-block to my mailbox. In my neighborhood, our "car route" mailboxes are planted in groups of five or six along one side of the road, to make life easy for the local mail carrier, in her car with the steering wheel on the wrong side… Just as my foot was poised over the sidewalk, I looked up to see the neighbor from across the street heading down his driveway, apparently with the same postal objective in mind. Our mailboxes are right next to each other.
At the prospect of actually meeting and having to interact with another human being, I hit the brakes and veered left, to the gate that leads to my back yard. Surely I could find something with which to busy myself…until the coast was clear. Even as I chickened out and opted for solitude, I chided myself for being such an antisocial old fart.
But as I headed for my gate to refuge, out of the corner of my eye, I saw my neighbor suddenly make his own left turn, head for his car that was parked on the curb in front of his house, and appear to be very focused upon some aspect of his windshield. I slyly detected a kindred spirit. Once through the gate, from the vantage point of the step up into my back door, I could see over the fence just enough to catch Mr. Neighbor heading toward his mailbox as soon as I was safely otherwise occupied.
I was at first amused—that there was indeed at least one other person in the world as transparently allergic to casual social interaction as I am… And then, somewhat relieved—that maybe I am not quite the "old fart" I believe myself to be… But, in the end, disturbed—that the social reticence that I had until now taken as a personal quirk is, apparently, an increasingly common malady in middle class American neighborhoods.
It is sad, isn’t it?
6 comments:
I find myself at times avoiding social contact myself because I am tired of talking and can't stand any more small talk. ues, it is a growing movement in our country! lol.
Can you tell I just woke up!!
I do find it sad. More and more people are isolating themselves and becoming afraid to get involved. It starts with the mailbox....
It is sad, but it's a fact of life. I know there are times I'll try to avoid contact simply because I lack the emotional energy for a conversation or the real stuff is running so close to the surface that I know I couldn't respond to a how-are-you with just a proper and polite fine. Sometimes people are just too much.
I think my computer has fear of socialization. Every time I tried to leave a comment I froze up. Let's see if this works.
:-)
P.S. I would never think of you as an anti-social type. When we met, you were very social, not only with me but the vendors. Perhaps, you just have to be in the mood for it. I know I do.
I know most of my neighbors. For the most part, we're friendly but not friends, and all of us seem to like it like that. Recently, though, I've exchanged greetings a few times (just a casual "hello" and a wave) with a woman in her early 60's who lives down the street from me. Her elderly mother died a few years ago, and she lives alone. One day this spring, she stopped me and said, "I'd like to exchange phone numbers,here's mine," thrusting a slip of paper into my hand. Inwardly, I groaned. "I'm not much for talking on the phone," I said, but I gave her my number, because I felt it would be incredibly rude not to. Since then, she's called a couple of times, inviting me to go to lunch with her. We live on the same street and I guess we probably use the same electric company, but other than that, insofar as I can tell, I have nothing in common with her, so I've turned her down each time, because I have no desire to spend time with her. I sense this huge loneliness in her, for which I'm sorry, but too often I've been a stand-in therapist for people I barely know...so I'm learning to say no...and I may have ducked around the corner myself, given the circumstances.
Judi
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