The One Brief Smile

I took my time returning from the laundry room. The day’s scorching heat had eased into a pleasantly warm twilight and as the sun sunk and its light dimmed, I felt my spirits rise. My thoughts danced around plans for the weekend, the chores back at home that my casual stroll was intended to prolong and the random weirdness of mind-wandering free association.

The winding pathway between the laundry and my apartment passes several banks of doorways to other apartments in the complex. In one I have seen an older Middle Eastern couple, usually the woman, sitting or standing on their second-floor balcony and watching the world pass. Now I noticed them sitting in a semi-circle with a younger man, maybe their son, on the cool grass in front of their staircase. Their position didn’t strike me as particularly odd; plenty of people were out and enjoying the first decent indication of summer after a long, wet and rather chilly spring.

I regarded the small group, chatting idly, without much active notice. Their exact origin was uncertain; my ability to identify regional characteristics for my own race is limited, for others it is more so. I blame ignorance, although I have also never made it a priority to identify people based on their physical attributes: If a man is dark skinned, my concern as to whether his origin be Nigeria or British Columbia is middling; it shouldn’t matter where a person appears to originate, this age of globalized transportation has necessitated a sort of pseudo-nationalism rather than a firm one. It hardly matters most of the time in any case.

My casual gaze was suddenly met by the younger man. our eyes locked for a moment. Reflexively, I smiled and my head gave a slight nod. It was nothing special to me, a simple courtesy greeting to someone I had never seen before and assumed I would never see again. But that one brief smile sparked a chain reaction that I cannot shake from my mind.

In response to my passing acknowledgment, the young man broke into a very wide, toothy grin filled with exuberance. He nodded heavily, head back and then tossed down until his chin touched the front of his soft cotton tunic. His sitting mates turned and though I recognized them from around the complex, they—for the first time—smiled and nodded. My small smile cracked wider at the display of sudden joy I felt from them, and though I was still walking past them and they were soon at my back, my grin remained long past them and around the corner into the parking area in front of our building.

As I mounted the steps to our second-story apartment, the young man’s reaction to my common gesture stuck in my mind. I tried to imagine why he would seem so excited to be simply smiled at. I wondered if perhaps, after 9/11, he maybe hadn’t seen many people smile when he met their eyes. Maybe he had grown accustomed to seeing distrust and fear behind the worried glances of accidental eye contact before the gaze quickly darted away. Perhaps it had been a long time since he had seen a smile from a stranger. I supposed, on the other hand, that this man could simply be a kind and happy soul—the kind of person for whom life is always sunny and whose toothy grin is something of a permanent fixture. Maybe my simple nod and quiet smile hadn’t offered any reassurance but had merely started a common reaction he relied on often to show friendliness. It could simply be that his casual acknowledgment of me was just more overstated than mine of him.

It occurred to me that it didn’t ultimately matter. All I knew was that this man’s happy response to a thoughtless gesture had reminded me of how often I pass by people and give them a cold and unfeeling stare. I remembered the times when my smiles didn’t come because of some internal issue or laziness or apathy and my fellow humans were left to bask in the icy glare of problems they had no part in. How many times had I been the averted glance, the sketchy look or the uncomfortable stare? How often was I the non-smile that made people’s shells build that one added layer of cynicism and mistrust?

This one moment, probably meaningless to the man and his companions, reminded me of the power of the one brief smile, the quick kind word, the “please” or “thank you” that wasn’t expected. Usually I live in my cocoon of cynicism and for a time I felt cynical about even that. How stupid we are for forgetting that maybe if we just let loose of the grand gestures and big, self-serving charades of charity and focused more on simple courtesy, a sadly uncommon but so simple respect for each other: warts, contrary opinions, choices and appearance completely aside to give a short chance at connection, shared through a wordless nod of head and turn of mouth to someone with nothing else in common but being here on this rock as it hurtles through space and time, revolving around a ball of fire in an infinity of blackness.

It is an odd feeling to be disheartened and uplifted simultaneously. In that moment the fate of the world seems grim and yet there is in that second a glimmer of hope that is hard to recapture and easy to forget.

I gave Nikki a hug when I came back in, we chatted for a while and as the timer in the kitchen went off I gathered the laundry basket and stepped lightly down the stairs, introspective but not unhappy. The deep blue of dusk was threatening to give way to night and the crickets were out. I passed by the smashed patch of grass, now vacant, and felt the cool evening breeze cut the humid air. I sighed. And smiled, remembering.

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