I’m the proud father of a massive bicycle, a fancy-pants deal that does not fit into my elevator (I live on the sixth floor) without some creative geometry and a lot of hoisting. The other day I took ten minute trying to see if I could get the bike in with the kickstand down to save some time.
When I finally got out with the bike on the bottom floor, an old man was coming down the stairs just in time to chew me out for hogging the elevator. He did it in stride, as he was walking by, like really good players do in first person shooters – firing in one direction and moving in another. I think I stammered something in my defense, but I felt bad about it even though he was being a jerk, and it was all over in seconds.
You might think I would remember this guy, but I couldn’t quite recall his face or whether he had glasses, so over the past week I’ve had to size up every old man I see in the elevator, trying to remember if we have a contentious relationship or not. It’s a situation worthy of Seinfeld.
Elevator etiquette is different here, so you have more potential interactions with the people in your building than you would in Boston, where I was living before I moved here. In my building, every time someone gets off the elevator, we say hasta luego, even when we haven’t looked at each other over the entire ride. That little hasta luego can carry a lot of meaning, if you’re the kind of person who analyzes these things, and I am and I do. They can say it slowly or quick, clearly or indistinctly, late or early. There’s one older man I can only think of as a gentleman, because he dresses sharply and his hasta luego is always a little late, as though he were obliged to say it but didn’t want to deign to acknowledge my existence. Other people say it loudly and clearly and early, and it seems like they’re really saying “goodbye”, even if they’re not looking you in the face, which they often don’t.
I’ve been trying to figure out what these two little words mean when you say nothing else to someone. It probably means nothing to anybody else, but to me, it’s kind of a verbal acknowledgment that whenever we share space we are actually communicating and interacting, even if only through a lack of explicit communication. It’s like saying, “I know you’re there, I just didn’t have anything to say today.”
