Cheer
“Have a good day.”
I would. I could. I should. I might. I need to. I wish. I don’t know. This having, is it something that I can possess? Or does it possess me? How exactly does a day add up?
The words are spoken by a cashier after I’ve received my change—thirty-eight cents—for a cup of coffee and a newspaper. The words are automatic yet have a scrim of sincerity. They lubricate the wheels of socialization and good feeling. They ward off evil spirits. They personalize the impersonal. They offer something other than the cold abstraction of money. They summon the phantom of cheer.
It is only a phantom, however. I move on with my caffeine fix and newspaper, which typically is full of events stemming from bad days or, at the least, problematic ones—wrangling political parties, failing economic schemes, and various species of recrimination, some patent—“Film Star Sues for Divorce”—or merely diplomatic—“XYZ Country Lodges a Protest or Raises Tariffs or Moves Troops to the Border.” Life is a grudge and the human race is holding on tight. My good day may not be your good day. My good day may make your day miserable. If it makes my day good then my day is justified. Someone wins the election or ball game and someone else loses. Heaven is the ultimate good day. The less said about hell the better.
The phoniness of false cheer wounds us. We hunger for sincerity and we get a product, a facsimile, a dodge, a ghost, a parody. The second in which I register that longing and disappointment is terribly slim. “You too,” I say back. The cashier looks at me or doesn’t look at me, hears me or doesn’t hear me. Maybe all those things are happening at the same time. The woman behind me already has placed on the counter a bag of potato chips and a quart of skim milk. These will help her have a good day. At the least they will help her subsist on the earth. Is subsistence a good day?
Americans are particularly susceptible to the conundrums of cheer and false cheer. As it seeks to prove their openness is not a sham, American optimism must enter every devious sigh of existence. Attitude, as endless apostles of uplift have testified, is everything. The pursuit of happiness is a full time job. Whatever financial strings are being pulled by lobbyists and plutocrats do not matter. Those people are off in Washington and New York, cloistered in wood paneled rooms where they pick an occasional thread off their expensive suits. Those millions and sometimes billions they manipulate are winsome clouds in a faraway sky. The rest of us, stuck as we are in our hourly wages, have to do the heavy lifting of getting along. If we are strangers to one another, we can at least be amiable strangers. We can evoke an all-purpose, all-encompassing platitude even as we take another antacid to deal with the bills, a substance-abusing spouse, a threatened layoff, a health crisis, or just plain weariness. We can say, “I’m human and you’re human even if we don’t act human in any meaningful sense.” False cheer is the residue of mass anxiety. Even as we are assailed, we remain here with one another and are determined to honor our plight. Or the store manager tells us what to say to our customers and we listen because we need a job.
There are those, however, who are possessed of genuine cheer. Each day is a good one because they are, after all, above ground. And they feel that. Whether simple, wise, heedless, child-like or all these qualities at the same time, they understand that worry and its sober fantastications, weigh a soul down. They are glad to feel the blood humming in their veins and the breath in their lungs—a feeling not to be hoarded. “Good for you,” they say without any boss prompting them. An insubstantial yet resolute commodity, cheer wants to be shared.
A person of good cheer can weep, grieve, and sorrow. Cheer is not a mask but a path; sometimes the path falls away. The body’s tendency, however, is to right itself. Cheer is health in its basic form—the rising, greeting, and moving through a new day. Walt Whitman was full of this kind of cheer as he walked around Manhattan. Human energy, as it follows meaningful directions, is exultant: “I sing the body electric.” When the sad times came, Whitman could deeply grieve, whether for soldiers in the Civil War or Abraham Lincoln.
As cheer salutes each day, cheer is utterly open. Everything already is here. Yes, people have to make livings and, yes, people often do not understand one another or even try to understand one another and experience heartbreak, tedium, violence, and despair. Cheer is not a Pollyanna. What is infectious about real cheer is that other people feel that salute, which is so remote from a military salute. Cheer’s salute is a salutation ever greeting the multifarious planet. “Behold, it was very good.” Cheer would agree.
Even in the weird, fluorescent, tomb-like, antiseptic atmosphere of a convenience store where there is little real food or, as one gapes at some concocted headline, real anything, cheer can make itself felt. Ignominy is a basic stuff of human happenstance and cheer knows that. There remains the elemental gist of being human, of being this creature that is unlikely to exist in this form anywhere else in the very wide universe. Cheer is big-headed but delights in the thrill of being: the clerk’s chipped, pink fingernail polish, her slightly askew, glass bead necklace, even her clipped admonition to “Have a good one.” Cheer can do that, not as a party line but as a sovereign predilection.
Cheer
Baron... you’re a freaking genius! Yup! Nailed it !
Delight in the thrill of being. Yes!
Thank you for this.