Maybe you can remember, those who had or have grandparents in the countryside, what it was like when you went visiting them. In villages, everybody knows everybody, and people greet each other whether they knew their name or not.
When I was child, we would travel to the village of my grandparents by a coach that would drop us off “at the main street”. To reach our grandparents’ house it was over a mile’s walk. We had to greet everyone, whether on the left, or on the right. That is what was expected of us, my mother would say, so that the people there knew who we were, and it was the polite thing to do.
I would stay there during the summer vacation and I would take part in the discussions women had on the bench, near the front gate. Most of them would go out, gathering in groups, sometimes on their bench sometimes on someone else’s and talk. What about? About everything: what food they have cooked, if their pickles have hardened, if they slept during the night, what they dreamt about, if their children are coming back from Bucharest, how was the visit to the dispensary, how the doctor recommended taking your regular injection of vitamin B, that it helps, about who died, and many more. These trivialities where an important part of their lives. Those who did not come out for a little gossip on the bench where seen as a bit “out there”.
When I went back home, my mother would say that it would not do to listen to gossip, that I had to keep myself to myself, that it is good to keep a certain elegance, or discretion in a conversation.
And yet, I have found the same behaviour many years later, in a school where I worked for a while: in the teachers’ room, a teacher told the story of how she made semolina with milk, how she mixed it with a lot of jam, how she ate it and went to bed. Being very vocal, she always had some yes man around (or the minister – dogs, however you want to call them).
I was fresh out of university – I had studied Foreign Languages at a time when this was no mean feat. It seemed to me that those confessions where unworthy of the teachers’ room of an outstanding high school in Bucharest, which I perceived to be more elitist.
Now, many years later, I realized that those conversations from the bench moved on Facebook. A bit different, to tell the truth, in the shape of ‘witty replies’, with confessions such as ‘My legs go all the way to the ground and my head is between my ears’, I eat and I also do other things. This involution can stem from the need to be the centre of attention at any price, even that of being ridiculous; the shallowness that lurks around the corner, the ease with which we want to show how good we are at anything, how we have seen /done it all since we were in our twenties, and we can really teach others lessons.