BY TED SHOCKLEY, Eastern Shore Post —
Services finally had concluded at the Presbyterian church on a bright spring day. I was 5 or 6 years old.
I yawned and slouched out the door, into the noon daylight, and past the older men, who began to pack Sir Walter Raleigh tobacco into their pipes for an after-sermon smoke and some conversation.
I looked at one of them — a gray-haired man with a gray coat, gray pants, his head framed by gray pipe smoke — and he winked at me.
I smiled in return. It happened that quickly.
I remember the wink more than I remember the sermon or what hymns were sung. I do not even remember what I did later that afternoon.
I just remember being somewhat comforted by the wink.
There were no words spoken and no need for them. A simple wink had communicated a nuanced understanding, connection, and friendliness.
To me, the wink conveyed that probably he also had been roused too early from comfortable sleep, forced to wear uncomfortable clothes, and had his fair fussed over by the Woman of the House.
The wink conveyed that he also would have rather been piddling at home on that Sunday morning than sitting on a hard, wooden pew, but there was technically no other option.
Sometimes, there is just no way to finagle out of something, especially when the Woman of the House wants her people in church on Sunday morning.
The wink seemed to tell me that he knew how I felt and that I was not alone.
In our contemporary world of wordy analysis and breathless explanation, the silent-but-knowing wink is all but extinct.
Yes, there is the wink emoji, but that is usually used to convey playfulness in a text or email after a string of words. And it is not the same as a real, live, face-to-face wink, with no accompanying verbiage.
But today, we have the opposite of the silent wink. In fact, people these days will not stop talking.
We have “mansplainers” — a funny word that combines “man” and “explainer” — who will authoritatively hold forth about whatever topic they overhear to the chagrin of all within earshot.
And we have “momsplainers,” which is the word for womenfolk who will not stop giving dissertations on topics, including how to correctly brush your teeth, the importance of wearing clean skivvies, and the like.
These days, we have motormouths and chatterboxes, windbags and talkaholics, keyboard warriors and online oversharers.
None of them communicate nearly as well or clearly as the silent-but-knowing wink delivered by the pipe-smoking man in the churchyard.
Understand also that winks should be used with a degree of caution, because they can be flirty, and therefore dangerous.
For example, a man winking at a woman can be an untoward and creepy act. In the workplace, such an action might prompt a report to the human resources department, and rightfully so.
For a woman to wink at a man could prompt just about anything, knowing men the way I know them.
True story: A couple of years ago, I was hollering at a Philadelphia Phillies baseball game, and a woman heard my hollering, looked my way, and playfully winked at me with a combination of brio and panache. She was an experienced man-winker.
My throat got dry and I began to sweat. I quickly stopped hollering to curtail her interest. I felt the immediate need to get away from the winking girl from the big city who made me nervous.
But used innocuously and in the right context, the wink very succinctly and silently conveys a lot of words — and an accompanying feeling of camaraderie.
The wink has visual-communication cousins like the nod and the thumbs-up sign that seem to build fellowship, mutual trust, and inclusiveness.
In contemporary times, anything that brings us together, like these gestures do, should be celebrated.
Almost a half-century later after the churchyard wink, I was in the grocery story and saw a child who looked to be 5 or 6 years old.
He yawned and slouched and clung to the shopping cart his mother was pushing.
He looked like he would rather have been anywhere else.
Like me, he simply was not able to finagle himself out of a trip to the grocery store.
I was pushing a cart in the other direction. As we passed, I winked at him. He smiled back.
There were no words spoken and no need for them.
n The writer is editor of the Eastern Shore Post. He can be reached at [email protected]
