Say Too Much

At the diner yesterday morning, the mood was swell, though not ebullient. You could hear an extra degree of chattiness—where are you eating later?—but then again, many of the usual crowd were absent.

I aim to be a good customer: no hassle, happy to be there, as good a tippper as my means allow. This secures me my favorite booth when it is available, the perks of being served coffee before I order it and, when they are in a pinch, the chance to help out, like delivering turkey dinners and pies headed around town.

Still, I do not think the owner or the waitresses I know are "friends.” Friendly? For sure. Friends? I do not know. They do not have my deets nor I theirs. If they are on social media, I do not follow them and none of them know I write this.

Instead, what we know of each other is shared in moments of saying too much or too little, which is more or less how everyone talks here. It is a form of conversation that did not need a name before the Internet but does now.

News about a car, the attention someone’s dog requires, how the walk-in fridge is on the fritz, updates on parents or kids, a bad joke about pancake size (they’re giant), and so on (and so on) get told and heard as anecdotes, over-shares, and talk too small to measure.

(Mostly, in what is said to me and what I overhear I imagine subtexts: . . . I’m worried as hell . . . Dogs are better than customers . . . A smile is how I endure . . .)

In sum, the back-and-forth of what is said and what is not said mills patrons into neighbors, it safeguards our shrinking island of “I am a human being among other human beings.”

And when called on to offer a question, an eye-roll of sympathy, or a joke, I do O.K. My human interface skills are not altogether shabby. Then again, it is harder to fail here than elsewhere, since ‘friendly’ lowers the stakes on ‘friend’ and the work of being is not to be done alone.