Winking

Asheville is a very friendly town. People tend to greet each other, walking down the street. If you make eye contact, it is a little abnormal (out of the norm) to not somehow acknowledge the other person. I still get a kick out of how prevalent is the southern “Hey”, instead of my Midwest “Hi”.

But I’ve been having a lot of fun lately just winking at people.

Actually it’s a whole range of facial cues, not just winking. I wish I could see them all – I might be better equipped to describe them. I know that a lot of it has to do with things I do with my mouth. Also raising my eyebrows – sometimes maybe paired with opening my eyes wide, the opposite of a wink.

I know that my spate of these little eruptive expressions has something to do with my current impulse to greet even more folks, without going through the whole drill of forming words, or even making sounds – especially when our eye contact is so minimal that words might feel forced, like too much. My face has always tended to be fairly expressive, and my penchant for physical comedy has involved things I do with my face as well as the rest of my body. Many of these little acknowledging expressions – as best as I know, never having seen them – carry a very light quality, cute and fun if not actually comic. I think the people I am greeting enjoy these little acknowledgements and that these come across as less odd than they would in a less greety town.

I wrote the title for this piece sitting out in the sun just now, then walked into the coffee shop where several of my friends had pulled up too many chairs around a teensy little table. It really was kind of a little gaggle of us.

Robin and I like each other, although our relationship is based more on greeting and sometimes hugging each other than on a whole lot of conversation. She was sitting across from me – way too far to even touch fingers. There, just maybe two minutes after writing this title, she gave me the most absolutely comic series of winks, eyebrow raisings, twitches and nervous tics that I have maybe ever seen. It was not only delightful in and of itself, but so synchronistic, on the heels of having just set myself the agenda to write about winks. I just had to go around the table, pull up a chair behind her (no room by the table) and tell her of this cute little cosmic joke. She got a kick out of it, but – in this town, where synchronicity happens more and faster – neither of us was especially surprised.

And that’s maybe the point. We are all connected – in ways large and small, obvious and subtle, visible and invisible, serious and silly. And that’s what I’m wanting to acknowledge, without going through all the rigmarole of words.