A Case for Weak Ties

on seeing family in strangers

I talk to strangers. Sometimes it’s because I’ve already eavesdropped a little, like while waiting in line for a human cashier at the Albertson’s that has converted to almost 100% self-check after 7pm. Or because I’ve noticed the effect of someone’s behavior, like when crossing the street to get to my bus stop and a car started c’mon-hurry-up honking, so the young woman in an adorable plaid jumpsuit behind me darted into a run and slipped on the icy sidewalk ramp.

I get some of this from my dad, who is expert at designing invitations for strangers to engage with him, little openings meant to build community like loudly musing about the time he saw a band in the same genre as the one on someone’s t-shirt. He’s masterful at slipping New Orleans, or music, into any conversation: the second he gets a glimpse of a fleur de lis or French bread, the moment someone mentions jazz. Or blues. Or rock and roll. Any overheard dialect that sounds remotely Southern. Any football team logo if they’ve ever played the Saints or LSU. We scan for connection, my dad and I.

A writer whose newsletter I subscribe to recently recommended starting the day with a calendar reminder – before any meetings or appointments – that says “what will you care about today?” I think my answer is often “a stranger.”

My local co-op market has just changed the deli so that there are no longer employees to help you navigate pints vs quarts, to offer samples, or to chat with: just rows of pre-scooped tuna salad, chipotle yams, and Steph’s tofu (a recipe developed by a real deli employee!) I was stunned by just how much it changed my experience at the entrance, to be greeted not by people but by built-ins large enough to obscure the actual employees still working in the kitchen behind the structure. At the checkout, the line was long and chatty. I asked the cashier when the deli changed and she sighed that it had been two weeks. After I said I was sad not to get to talk to the familiar faces there, the woman behind me chimed in and mused that everything was becoming so dehumanized now. Our cashier admitted she couldn’t stand monitoring the self-checkout area, because then how would she know about things like my daughter’s Galentine’s Day party plans, or that the meals I was stocking up on were for an annual writing getaway with my husband. The little stories we share with strangers are also how we understand ourselves.

A few months ago, I met a woman named Joan. She mentioned several times that she was legally blind as she padded into the Cookie Nail Salon. Her daughter had popped in before her to confirm with the manager and nail technicians that they knew it was her mom, Joan, who would be coming in, and through crackled English and easygoing nods, several employees confirmed they knew the arrangement. She re-emerged and hurriedly led her mom to the waiting sofa before vanishing. Joan on the sofa, half-propped up by her walker. Joan on the sofa, reminding me of the days when we would escort my grandma Helen, from the sofa of her assisted living home to the sofa of our house, from the bed of her room to the bed of the hospital and back again. Shepherding her from soft surface to soft surface.

Once she was seated next to me, I could see that Joan had five different colors represented on her ten nails, all of which were longer and stronger than mine, and all of which she wanted to replace with new colors. From left pinky to thumb she had bright greens, pinks, and blues of spring, and right thumb to right pinky, patriotic but sultry reds and blues. She declared she wanted ten distinct colors this time, but because she couldn’t see, the nail technician would need to show and describe each color to her. They struggled through this act of double translation, of color and of concept, of description and of metaphor. I piped in, no that’s not pumpkin orange, that’s black. No, that’s not dark green, but more of a lime green. That’s a sage green, too light. She wanted a yellowish red and a vibrant orange. She wanted her thumb and forefinger to represent Halloween, the middle finger to be an autumn-inspired green and her ring and pinky fingers to move into the yellows and reds of her favorite maple trees.

Joan told me how fun it is to do whatever you want in old age, and that in the nursing home everyone compliments her bright red nails, but then whisper that they’d never do it themselves. She smiled and said she liked being known as the crazy lady. With a wicked grin, she announced that there were benefits to being blind, but she didn’t know what those benefits were, because she couldn’t see them. I imagined if we were looking at each other instead of sitting side-by-side at the nail booth, she would’ve winked at me several times. Sensing that she would love the puns of the nail polish colors on her fingers, I told her that the orange of her thumb was Sorry There Was Traffic and that the green of her middle finger was called Time to Cut the Collard Greens. “Good thing it’s going on my nails and not in my mouth,” she quipped. She then reminisced about donating food from her garden to a safe house for women who were abused, and she recollected that the clients often asked her if she had any collards. They must have been from the South she said, and, channeling my dad, I immediately said, “I’m from the South!” This declaration caused her to move her head as much as she could to try to get a real look at me while drawing out a “reallllly?” “Yes, I just got back from New Orleans yesterday!” “New Orleans!” she hooted and then paused.

The pause was long enough for me to study her mouth, which had a little smudge of lipstick on her teeth like my favorite Great Aunt Muriel, and long enough for me to imagine them drinking gimlets together in the sticky heat of summer. Joan then launched into the story of having gone to New Orleans only once, for Mardi Gras in the early 1960s. She was 20 years old, and Al Hirt and Pete Fountain were both in the parades. Jazz musicians I’d seen dozens of times, their names shot a strange homesickness into my veins the way things do when I miss what I chose to leave. Joan peppered me with stories of men who’d bend down from a parade float to give beads, but come in for a kiss, and how she and her friend, who were both dirty blondes, not real blondes, would flirt their way into men’s hotel rooms to use a proper bathroom instead of using a port-a-john, and would quickly make excuses to get back to what was happening in the streets.

My last parade-filled Mardi Gras was before Aloe was born, when I was in grad school, when I still smoked (Camel Lights). Quitting was made easier by the health goal of getting pregnant within the year, but carried unexpected grief in the form of lost social ties. By the smoking bench outside of Allen Hall, I brainstormed seminar papers, got caught up on local bands, talked about misinterpreted literary theories, listened to run-of-the-mill but energetic bitching, planned conference panels, and gossiped about professors, grad school colleagues, and professors-with-grad school colleagues. Many of us who quit noticed that our networking and conference paper productivity declined, as did our awareness of what was happening in our community, who was going where, dating whom, and reading what. Between the small talk with a stranger in the checkout line and a cozy conversation with a friend was the low-stakes space of a ten-minute cigarette break to try out new conversations and try on new identities.

The loneliness epidemic started emerging as a theme in my classes well before the pandemic but certainly and definitively define my classrooms now, five years post-shutdown. What was once an easy space for lively conversation is now, truly, barren. I try not to romanticize the past, but look to how students talk about each other – how they wish more people spoke up in their classes, how “quiet and awkward” it is to be in a classroom before class begins, how hard it is to make small talk. And that’s the thing: small talk. Those tiny connections, the “weak ties,” can help us feel like we belong and matter, and when coupled with strong relationships, they create a diverse relationship portfolio, which researchers point to as evidence of a happier and more fulfilling life. By 2023, I started incorporating short news pieces about strangers, conversations, and connections into all my classes (I find it my own amusing game to figure out how to weave any important article or concept into every single class I’m teaching at the same time!) to get them reflecting on who they talk to outside of the home. For many students the answer, baffling to this chatterbox, was not really anyone. Last year, I started to notice an increase in students who privately wrote that they weren’t sure what to even talk about with a classmate or a stranger. This year I can barely get students to answer easy questions like “does anyone go to concerts” or “who made something delicious this weekend?” Many mornings, when I walk in the room and say hi, only one or two will even look up from their phones to make eye contact or say hi back.

My teaching icon and inspiration from childhood was Mrs. Frizzle from The Magic School Bus. The series blended thematic costumes, psychedelic adventure, and hands-on-learning: my actual dream job. Over our hour sitting next to each other, I talked to Joan about how I would pour over the many books in the series (autographed, thanks to my dad’s service on the board for electronic learning at Scholastic!), Mrs. Frizzle and her outfits (working thermometer earrings, snowmen high heels, and a dress with varied states of water? Yes, please. A cow dress and milk carton earrings with udder high heels? Sold.), and the magic of scholastic book fairs in school libraries. She told me her kids must be older than I am because she didn’t remember any of these things from when they were young. Somehow, she segued into a story about being a totally different parent than she thought she would be. Somehow, I segued into the story of my dad’s relentless position against tattoos the whole time I was growing up, only to surprise my mom and I in his 50s by getting a full-color one of Disney’s Goofy with the words Why Be Normal in honor of my sister. Joan cackled and she reiterated, it was great to be older and a little crazy.

I have no idea if my grandma Helen ever painted her nails but I remember that she was fierce in opinion, could craft words that cut, and would quote whole acts of Shakespeare plays. She was understated in appearance and made up for it in speech. She also lost her sight. I watched as she went from large-print to large-print plus magnifiers to books on tape, which proved to be an insufficient substitute. April will be 20 years since her death and I miss her more now than I ever have, I wish for my daughter and husband to know her as more than a name. I am finally the version of myself that she would recognize the most; in my head, my husband and hers would have been kindred spirits with their fiddles and their sketchbooks.

I’ll probably never see Joan again and I’ve thought about our conversation, our giggles and guffaws for months. I fought back tears as we were talking because I thought of the cruelty of not really understanding what a grandparent is, what generational elders are, until I had none. I imagine someone sitting next to my mom in a new nail salon 1000 miles away where she’s just moved with my dad in this next chapter of retirement. I imagine someone reading nail colors to her one day and them cackling like my mom and I used to when I got my favorite light blue callback to home: “rich girls and po’boys.” I imagine all that I’ve learned from strangers.