the way we live now

This is a copout phrase if ever I heard one.   It opens the door to stuff we don’t like but to which most of us surrender, because allegedly everybody else does – this last being  a major rationalisation too. 

So I was not researching an idea when I asked for a seat for the first time in my life.  I call what follows  “a sociological experience.”  It teaches me something about others in the society we share, even if I don’t like it. 

On the buses there is a section of seats marked for the elderly, people with sticks,  pregnant women or

… etc etc.     I often sit there. And there is a growing habit of people putting their children in a seat including the earmarked ones  and either sitting along side them or standing over them.  If the bus isn’t full, or the child is unwell, fine – but as a child I sat if necessary on my  mother’s knee or stood in the space in front of her – not much of it but I was small.  Same with my son, and he with his daughter.    

Tired, I asked a woman if I might sit in the seat occupied by her five year old son.   First blank denial, then disapproving and ineffectual huffing. My impression was she didn’t know what to do.  She might lose face with her child ? 

  I gave up and walked away.   (A friend who walks with a stick has been through a similar experience.)

Fortunately there was a seat further back next to a delightful woman (born here , family from St.Lucia) into which I subsided gratefully, remarking  “I don’t get it.”  And we began to talk about this reversal of child and parent, and other modern ways we didn’t enjoy.   She said she was bewildered by it (I judged her to be in her fifties.)

Charm and grace are hard ideas to write about.    Some people are apparently naturally charming , fake is often horribly obvious and even if you  couldn’t explain why this person or that piece of  behaviour  annoyed you though superficially perfectly pleasant – it’s because you sense something to be “off”.  

At his invitation, I recently took a couple of ideas to my 11 year old neighbour JJ who is playing The Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland at school. He gave me the script and we met to discuss it.  I suggested that instead of a grin, he bared his teeth which is what many animals do to show they are no threat.   And that he use the grimace as punctuation.  We went through some lines – yes !   And his mother put a home made card in my hand 24 hours later to say thank you .

Charm can be encouraged like any other gift.   And grace in the sense I mean it is close – Anna means graceful and I try.  An American painter called Norman Rockwell, whose work was commissioned by The Saturday Evening Post and featured on its cover, once made a picture called Saying Grace.  It illustrated just that, at a traditional Thanksgiving meal.  But this is not the 1950s in the US, and culinary tastes have changed.  I wanted to call this piece saying grace because it is about small graces expressed, and why we won’t risk that any more. And before you say “Well, it’s just the way we live now …” at bottom, I believe this is about that great contaminant, fear.

As a young woman I was taught to look for eye contact.  Good luck with that now.  People look beyond you, at the ground, at the screen and because of earphones of one variety or another they often can’t hear if you greet them.

But in years of talking to people anywhere I find them, I have very few knockbacks.   Because you may be safe up there in your ivory conversational tower,

but that’s only because you don’t know how or have forgotten how to do it outside a limited social group. 

Thank you takes a couple of seconds, it’s free and everybody beams.   Charm ?   Tick.  Grace ?  Tick.  Loss of face ? Nil.  Empowerment ?   Total.