Sunday, September 07, 2008 Sun.Star Essay: Beaming truth By Erma M. Cuizon
I WALKED out of the office to get a cab and here came a boy of 8 with a smile. “Want me to call a cab for you, ma’am?”
You can interpret his smile the way you like. He smiled because he wanted to be “hired” for the call-a-cab-for-me chore and get “paid” for it. But the smile is also too true to brush off, and why wouldn’t he smile when you’re smiling, too?
What if you were to stop a while from talk of problems in the news and consider the smile, instead? My smile, your smile, his smile, her smile, their smile ad infinitum.
How would you read the smile that Miss USA Crystle Stewart had after she tumbled in her march on stage during the Miss Universe contest? The way you’d interpret it would be different from the way she talked about it when interviewed later. She did more than smile but also clapped her hands as she got up after the tripping. But yes, she could really use it to show the world some good things happen when handled well. One such story after an interview had for a sub-head: “Plucky pageant finalist says ‘you just pick yourself up---in life in general.’ ”
You’d smile after a shock, smile when you’re scared, when you don’t know what to do, when you want to get lost but know you can’t---all to cover the humiliation and the surprise or the show joy.
We can never live without the smile. It’s a basic human reaction. We feel, we show what we feel in a smile, then we say something. Sometimes, the smile would do, the words would be superfluous.
When the telephone came into our life, we could tell whether a voice was smiling or not. The blind can tell the smile in a voice. But the telephone is one grade down from the sight of a smile in someone’s face just a touch away.
You’d think the smile would finally disappear in the list of dependables in our life when the texting came.
For quite a while, I refused to become part of the texting populace. But when I finally saw the mobile phone’s usefulness, the first message I texted out was to a friend whom I asked in a complete sentence with correct spelling, “Text me when you’re on your way, please.”
And she texted back, “K.” She was blunt.
I couldn’t put together the picture of my friend using her human voice saying, “K.”
Later, she would have a smiley after the K.
Sure, the voice has a smile but it can’t be a truncated smile as in a text message, nor a voice abridged, a language slashed and chopped. The smile says all it means and all it sounds to mean.
The smile is a universal language, you can’t erase it from the face. Some may hide it, suppress it, fake it, but not if it carries the heart with it.
According to a communication dynamics expert, women know very well how to fake smiles, as against men. Some men in certain cultures find the smile a picture of less power, as more of a female thing. Americans can fake a smile a lot, says communicator Patti Wood who is herself an American. The French hardly smile but smile heartily when there’s reason to do so. Sometimes the British are too staid to smile.
In Asian countries, you’d think they’re more of smiley (though not smileyest) but their culture on manners, especially for women, could restrain the lighting up of the heart. To the Indonesians, says Wood, “a smile is the way the face looks at any time.” Filipinos smile the smile you know has more than one meaning.
The more citified we are, the less we smile at neighbors. We say, “Okay, you’re smiling. What do you want?”
It is unlike in the isolated towns when the nearest neighbor across the hill is a valued friend with whom you could have a short shouting conversation across the void, with the inevitable smile.
