Wrinkly Bits
A Blog by Gail Cushman
Lessons on Loneliness from Small Town America
This morning I read a Facebook post talking about loneliness, that is, the difficulty of living alone. I get that. Being alone is hard, and unhealthy, according to experts smarter than I am. Being with others gives us the opportunity to laugh, argue, tease, and lament. How can I possibly argue the price of gas or lament about the cold weather or cuss out the politicians all by myself. For that matter, who wants to laugh alone? Laughter takes more than one person, and let’s face it: the late-night television pundits or evening sitcoms are not as funny as Johnny Carson and Lucille Ball used to be.

Gail Decker Cushman

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Oct 28, 2022

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This morning, the opportunity presented itself to have cup of coffee and a caramel sweet roll at a local restaurant. Great coffee and yummy rolls were guaranteed not to be on my perpetual diet, but I knew laughter and companionship surely would. The tiny restaurant is called Uncle Sam’s and it has about a dozen blue star checked tables and about a hundred wall hangings, all relating to military patriotism and support for the USA. Red, white, and blue, some of my favorite colors.

The owner tripled as server, cook, and cashier and did all well with a smile on her face, a kind word, and a pot of hot coffee in her hand. She serves no fried food, and you can order a half order of most of the menu items. She has been at that site for over twenty-five years and said that she was told that a non-fried food restaurant would be a failure, yet here she is over twenty-five years, making breakfast and lunch for working people in a small town and she has a full house, day after day. It may or may not be the food, but the friendly atmosphere makes you want to come back.

In the next room was a group of about a dozen men, doing the same thing we were, drinking coffee and sampling the breakfast fare. You can pretty much see this scene on any morning in any small town in America, people hashing over the weather, world events, and opinions about anything important in their life. On our second cup of coffee, about half of the men left and a woman, who happens to have political signs plastered all over town, strolled in and took a seat with the rest of the men. She was followed by a half dozen women, all of a certain age, comfortable with each other who joined in the conversation smoothly and easily, as if they were longtime friends, and they probably were. It is my guess that this gathering takes place several days of the month, maybe even daily with the same or different folks. The small-town culture requires that people talk to each other, get to know each other, worry about them when they don’t show up for coffee and sweet rolls. They put away their cell phones and look each other in the eye and talk about everything. They share. They share. They share and they aren’t lonely.

As I thought about the FB post I received earlier and compared it to this happy scene, I wondered why some people are so lonely while others are bursting at the seams with friends and people they know. It seems they understand that loneliness is a paradox. If every lonely person sought out another lonely person, the ailment itself would disappear.

For his birthday one year, I bought my son a book entitled, Stand Up, Shake Hands, Say How Do You Do. It’s a good book for teaching kids about manners, but actually, it really is a lesson on how not to be lonely. This is a good lesson for all of us at any age. Let’s get together to share a laugh face to face.

By the way, the only cell phone I saw was mine.

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