The car nosed into the crosswalk and the man turned his head to the right to look for oncoming traffic; when he rotated his head to the left, he saw me ambling down the sidewalk toward him. His car backed slowly out of the crosswalk as I approached, and when I passed in front of him, I lifted my arm and gave the man a small wave, a show of appreciation for his courtesy. I do not know if I surprised him, but he returned the wave.
A woman I know posted a series of notes on a social media site, starting on March 1st. 2011, the day that would have been her father’s 65th birthday. She wanted to “start focusing on appreciating the little things in life, instead of dwelling on the negative.” These “little things” are the small graces and gestures that we often fail to credit for easing our passage through life. As one of her friends on the site, I was privy to her daily ruminations. One of them was about “the wave.” On Day 93, she wrote, “Summer construction (gave her) three opportunities to let a last-minute car in … and each time, I got a wave.” One of those waves “even included an audible.” She concluded from this that “people aren’t so bad.”
When I am on the sidewalks with my granddaughter, I am powering her as she sits in the prow of her pram-ship of exploration and wonder. I am cautious as I approach intersections, and always wait for cars to either come to a complete stop, or finish gliding past the red hexagon. When I have calculated that Myah and I will come to an intersection at approximately the same time that an iron beast will arrive, I pause her ship a short distance back from the street, and wait for the car. If it stops, I try to make eye contact with the driver (which is sometimes hard to do, through fiercely tinted windows) so as to determine his or her intentions: Will you let us pass, or will you drive on? If I receive a wave of recognition, I push the pram across the street, acknowledging the yield with my own wave.
As my friend wrote, the wave is a little thing, a small signal of appreciation either for a good deed rendered or accepted. But there may be many more moments of quiet gratitude than there are of overt acknowledgement. Many years ago, I got an e-mail from a reader who was responding to a column I wrote. I can find neither the e-mail nor the column, but I must have said something about the lack of acknowledgement from people for whom I hold open the door. The reader asked if perhaps my hearing was impaired and suggested that I have it checked. Once I shook off the sharp sting of the reader’s criticism, I realized that she had, albeit inadvertently, alerted me to the possibility that I might have been missing the “thanks” that people render, either audibly or non-verbally, the eyebrow flash or the nod of the head.
A professor once noted in the English Literature class that I was attending that writing is heuristic, and in the course of crafting these 600 words I’ve learned that I may be judging strangers too harshly. A woman on a recent episode of “The People’s Court” initiated a confrontation with a pedestrian who failed to say “thanks” when granted passage; I will try to assume that, even absent the physical manifestation, I had received the “little thing,” the wave.