Good (Meh) Morning

As a (former) resident of a big city like Chicago, I’m supposed to be cold, unfriendly and aloof. And I am. But it’s not Chicago’s fault. I would have been that way had I grown up in Smackover, Arkansas (population 1,881), Willacoochee, Georgia (population 1,434) or Kaliforsky, Alaska (population 6,250) or any of the thousands of other cities that constitute Small Town America, where the values of friendliness, truth, honesty and racis…I mean, hard work reside. But because I spent my formative years surrounded by a couple million other people in a metropolis hiding under the butt end of a lake, my requests for people to kindly get the fuck out of my way is somehow misconstrued as generic big city rudeness. Nothing could be further from the truth. Now kindly get the fuck out of my way.

That’s not to say that big city folk like Chicagoans are open, overly friendly, embracing and will hand you a puppy the minute you step off the Greyhound bus with your cardboard suitcase. We CAN be nice, we just don’t trip over ourselves doing it. You need directions to the Field Museum, Sears Tower, Art Institute or Garfield Park Conservatory, we’ll take time out of our busy day to point you in the right direction. But if you’re expecting a Chicagoan to simply read the distress on your face as you stand on the corner of State and Madison clutching an indecipherable street map, or sense your confusion, take you by the hand and lead you through the maze of underground Red and Blue Line subway tunnels, fugeddaboudit. You gotta ASK for help from a Chicagoan. For various reasons (decorum, personal space, the fear of getting a shiv in the gut), we don’t step in and volunteer information to complete strangers unless they ask for help. Hell, you’ll get two or three Chicagoans stopping to help you if you ask and they’ll debate the best route to your destination, leaving you to walk away feeling better about the city, despite the gunshots you hear afterwards as the “debate” between the Good Samaritans devolves into a fatal argument.

I’ve heard tourists marvel at how nice Chicagoans were in comparison to their expectations, once they got over their fear of being stuffed in a trunk if they asked someone how to get to American Girl Place. Nope, we Chicagoans have no qualms about helping out a stranger in need on the street, mostly because we want you to find where you have to go and get the fuck out of our way.

So, like I said, we can be nice, we just don’t go out of our way to do it. Which means no saying “Good morning!” to complete strangers on the street just because our paths happen to cross, no “after you…no, after you” dance when it comes to getting on a subway car, no pitching in to help you with that big sofa that you’re struggling to bring into your apartment by yourself unless there’s a sawbuck involved. That rushing around you see us doing as you’re standing in front of the Disney Store blocking sidewalk traffic is us getting to where we have to go, doing stuff and generally going about our day without unnecessary chit-chat. If we give you a “what up?” head nod as we pass you on the street, consider yourself blessed.

Which brings me to my second day in Denver, a Wednesday morning when the sun was shining and despite the remnants of snow on the ground and it was warm enough for a person to walk around with their jacket unzipped and not have the wind sick a cold hand down their chest. Warm enough for a person to work outdoors, which explained the whining of the power drill I heard as I walked back and forth from the car to the apartment taking items from one into the other. On a trip back into the apartment, carrying my dirt-covered spare tire bike rack, I followed the sound upward and saw a guy drilling on a wooden post on the balcony of a second floor apartment. I wasn’t sure what he was doing, whether he was removing something, replacing something or installing something, but if you had to do outdoor work on a February morning, this would be the one, which I suspected he already knew.

On my last trip out of the apartment, carrying my gym bag and headed to my car to drive to Bally’s, I heard the drill still whining away, but this time accompanied by a woman’s voice. I couldn’t make out what she was saying but I assumed she was talking to the guy with the drill since the two sounds were coming from the same direction. I walked through the courtyard and toward the front gate when the voice suddenly got louder and seemed to now be aimed in my direction.

“Morning!”

I hesitated to turn around and look up because for all I know, that shout could be directed to someone else. It’s happened before, me thinking that I’m the recipient of a vocal greeting, a wave or a car horn honk, realizing I don’t know the person who appears to be signaling me and figuring out the real object of their attention-getting maneuvers is standing behind me or next to me, and I’m forced to figure out a way to exit from this situation gracefully, to pretend that I wasn’t really waving back, just wiggling my wrist because it was sore from writing, see, or that I was actually waving at someone behind THEM, so there.

“Morning!! MORNING!!!”

The voice was more forceful this time. Ok, she apparently wasn’t going to give up, so I gave a quick look around to see if there was anyone else in my proximity. There wasn’t. And I didn’t hear the drill guy stop or acknowledge her so I concluded that she wasn’t talking to him. So at the risk of looking like an idiot, I figured I had to respond. After all, I was new here and I didn’t want to immediately become known as the anti-social asshole in the building. That was my title back in Chicago anyway.

I looked up, saw the drill guy and next to him, through the bushes that partially blocked the view, I saw a woman in a robe leaning slightly over the balcony and looking in my direction. Although her hair was mostly black, her face made her look older than her black hair would suggest she was. Since I am lousy at guessing ages, I put her somewhere between 40 and 69.

“Good morning!” She yelled it again.

I’m not used to this, this random wish for a pleasant start to beginning of the day from a complete stranger. Hell, my own family didn’t greet each other like this in the A.M., our morning pleasantries going something like: “Hey, don’t eat all the Froot Loops. … Shut up, I wasn’t about to. …You did, you ate ‘em all, you pig. …Well, you should have got up earlier. …Ma!” Ah, good times…

But here was a complete stranger yelling “morning” at me, a wary, not-at-all-outgoing, technically-still-a-Chicagoan. And the tone with which she said it threw me off as well, employing the kind of urgency one usually reserves for drawing attention to falling boulders which are about to crush their hiking companions or alerting their paramours of the arrival of husband pulling up in the driveway. She was either really excited that it was morning or had a real desire to be heard over the sound of the drill. I’m not sure which.

This wasn’t the first time I’d encountered unexpected salutations from random citizens here in Denver. On earlier visits, Kim and I would jog in the nearby park (the one with little dollops of goose shit every three inches and signs warning of coyotes patrolling the area at night) and as we passed by people walking or running in the opposite direction, they’d greet us with “Good morning.” This disturbed me. For one, it required me to talk while running, and since I was not exactly marathon material and was still getting acclimated to the new altitude in the Mile High City, it was going to have to be one or the other. Second, I wasn’t sure if everybody did this. Was I now required to initiate the greeting process as well? If so, how often? Should I wait to see if they speak first and then return the greeting, or was that being standoffish and rude? Was this a practice reserved for grown-ups or did I have to say “good morning” to kids too? What about homeless guys? What if they’re wearing headphones (the joggers, not the homeless guys)? What if I’M wearing headphones? You can see how quickly this can spiral out of control and why I wish people would just shut up and run.

Not that everyone in Denver was super-cheerful. There were more than enough people who walked down the street tight-lipped and silent and I figured they were new in town like me, landing here from cities where doors were locked tight at night, where streets with one or more lights out were avoided and where Ratso Rizzo informed aggressive drivers that, hey, I’m walkin’ here! But there were still a substantial number of people who felt compelled to greet me even thought we hadn’t been formally introduced. From the hipster guy walking past me in front off the coffee shop to the Mexican woman hanging out with her drinking buddies on a bus stop bench (Ok, she did yell “Hey, Bill!” at me, but I’m still going to count that one.)

This was never a problem in Chicago where the vast majority of people say nothing to each other and that works out just fine. Not because we were rude or hate each other but because it was just more socially expedient that way. We wished each other a good morning by not interfering with each other’s morning to say it. That phrase, “The less said, the better” was tailor-made for Chicago. Unless I say otherwise, have a great fucking day, ok pal?

Balcony-yelling lady wasn’t giving up. She leaned over the railing like a guy trying to haul in a 75-pound striped marlin, staring right at me and waiting to reel in my response. I thought for a second about ignoring her to prove a point and teach her a valuable lesson: don’t expect everybody to be as happy to see the new day as you, oh woman of indeterminate age. But I caved under the tremendous pressure of social conventions. I thought about the consequences of ignoring her, the comments about me that would seep through the building like smoke, the awkward encounters in the laundry room. I looked up and her and offered a feeble, half-mumbled “morning.” Not a “GOOD morning”, mind you, just “morning”, as minimalist a greeting as I could offer. I do have my standards. You’ll take your goddamn one-word “morning” and like it.

I was forced to admit defeat, a loss in the battle to stay just as I was when I left Chicago. But the war is not over. I’ll have Denverites ignoring each other in the morning in no time.

It’s time to go jogging.