Hello and Goodbye
July 19, 2000
Hellos and good-byes are very dramatic moments for me. All my emotions surge to the front and I’m sometimes just overwhelmed. Of course, this doesn’t count in the grocery store and I can pretty much buy gas and see people in the laundromat—our dryer is broken—and leave and not choke up. But when I say good-bye at the end of a good conversation with a friend, I feel a wonderful synthesis where all the parts of our friendship come together and we put a seal on it and make a commitment to remember this moment and remember what happens when we’re together. It’s a bit much but it’s okay.
A good conversation is like this wonderful work of art that you make with someone and your good-bye is its only obituary, its only marker. A good conversation makes me feel I understand the world a little better, that I’ve corrected somewhere where I was going wrong and learned a little more about love. Talking freely about life and feeling an atmosphere where that can happen is my favorite experience. We talk and one thought leads to another and I connect your experiences to mine, which leads me to other thoughts of my own.
A good conversation seems to lead me somewhere in my day that I was supposed to go and didn’t realize until that conversation came along. My kids joke, sometimes not very happily, that I can find out more stuff about a person in fifteen minutes on the bus with them than their spouse has learned in twenty years. I’m a busybody, but I love to know what happens to people. It just amazes me.
So if good-bye is this overwhelming moment for me, hello is sometimes a difficult transition. Hello is my husband’s eager voice calling me just now while I’m writing this to say, “Hi, I love you.” I draw my attention away from the computer in a slight fog. Who is this man? What does he want?
I make the transition from talking to you to talking to him. I’m a bit annoyed and disturbed but at the same time, I definitely want him to continue to call and say hello. I turn my attention away from my inner life to this other conversation.
Hello has a bit of “the good impression” about it. You see a person in the grocery and you’re in your sweats and someone’s waiting for you out in the car and you’re picking up a $60 prescription and it’s four in the afternoon and 95 degrees outside and you’ve just finished weeding the front yard. It’s someone from my old ward. “Hi, Liz! How are your two sons and your husbands’ building business and your sister in Colorado?”
And I’m struggling to remember their name and whether or not I remember ever, at all, having seen their face. Nothing comes. I build nothing between us. I’m a soggy mess and I stay that way. No brilliant reply comes to my lips, I can barely smile back.
My friend Ursula’s slightly husky, cozy warm voice says, in her Swiss accent, “Ha-lo! So, you want to get a Coke this afternoon?”
“Yes, I want to get a Coke! I want to sit in the car with the air conditioning on and discuss our children and husbands and jobs and finances and what wedding presents to buy. I want to tell you how badly I’m doing on my diet and how much I need to clean out the basement. I want to hear that you, my friend, care that we might need a new vacuum cleaner and that college tuition is due this month and that my husband and I need to spend a weekend in Salt Lake at a hotel just to get away.”
So, I say hello and good-bye to you. If you were here in the basement with me, I would hug you and I hope you’d tell me about your day and we’d have an interesting conversation about our views on life. We’d share our observations about how things work about how to raise our kids and help our neighbors.
Perhaps you could tell me something about my roses or my tomatoes, how to get more of each. Maybe you’d like my recipe for soaking your shirt in bleach and dishwasher detergent so you could get the red blotch off. We could talk about our parents and what we did as little kids. I’d love to hear all about it.
Hellos and good-byes are very dramatic moments for me. All my emotions surge to the front and I’m sometimes just overwhelmed. Of course, this doesn’t count in the grocery store and I can pretty much buy gas and see people in the laundromat—our dryer is broken—and leave and not choke up. But when I say good-bye at the end of a good conversation with a friend, I feel a wonderful synthesis where all the parts of our friendship come together and we put a seal on it and make a commitment to remember this moment and remember what happens when we’re together. It’s a bit much but it’s okay.
A good conversation is like this wonderful work of art that you make with someone and your good-bye is its only obituary, its only marker. A good conversation makes me feel I understand the world a little better, that I’ve corrected somewhere where I was going wrong and learned a little more about love. Talking freely about life and feeling an atmosphere where that can happen is my favorite experience. We talk and one thought leads to another and I connect your experiences to mine, which leads me to other thoughts of my own.
A good conversation seems to lead me somewhere in my day that I was supposed to go and didn’t realize until that conversation came along. My kids joke, sometimes not very happily, that I can find out more stuff about a person in fifteen minutes on the bus with them than their spouse has learned in twenty years. I’m a busybody, but I love to know what happens to people. It just amazes me.
So if good-bye is this overwhelming moment for me, hello is sometimes a difficult transition. Hello is my husband’s eager voice calling me just now while I’m writing this to say, “Hi, I love you.” I draw my attention away from the computer in a slight fog. Who is this man? What does he want?
I make the transition from talking to you to talking to him. I’m a bit annoyed and disturbed but at the same time, I definitely want him to continue to call and say hello. I turn my attention away from my inner life to this other conversation.
Hello has a bit of “the good impression” about it. You see a person in the grocery and you’re in your sweats and someone’s waiting for you out in the car and you’re picking up a $60 prescription and it’s four in the afternoon and 95 degrees outside and you’ve just finished weeding the front yard. It’s someone from my old ward. “Hi, Liz! How are your two sons and your husbands’ building business and your sister in Colorado?”
And I’m struggling to remember their name and whether or not I remember ever, at all, having seen their face. Nothing comes. I build nothing between us. I’m a soggy mess and I stay that way. No brilliant reply comes to my lips, I can barely smile back.
My friend Ursula’s slightly husky, cozy warm voice says, in her Swiss accent, “Ha-lo! So, you want to get a Coke this afternoon?”
“Yes, I want to get a Coke! I want to sit in the car with the air conditioning on and discuss our children and husbands and jobs and finances and what wedding presents to buy. I want to tell you how badly I’m doing on my diet and how much I need to clean out the basement. I want to hear that you, my friend, care that we might need a new vacuum cleaner and that college tuition is due this month and that my husband and I need to spend a weekend in Salt Lake at a hotel just to get away.”
So, I say hello and good-bye to you. If you were here in the basement with me, I would hug you and I hope you’d tell me about your day and we’d have an interesting conversation about our views on life. We’d share our observations about how things work about how to raise our kids and help our neighbors.
Perhaps you could tell me something about my roses or my tomatoes, how to get more of each. Maybe you’d like my recipe for soaking your shirt in bleach and dishwasher detergent so you could get the red blotch off. We could talk about our parents and what we did as little kids. I’d love to hear all about it.
Comments