call me baby girl

As I stop to talk with my neighbor, a long-time resident of our neighborhood, he is parked next to the park with a truck and with a couple of other guys, all decked out in hunting camoflage; he and his pals intermittently yell out hellos and hays at the trucks that drive by. Almost every one of them. The feeling I get is: Joe knows everybody. Everybody knows Joe.

When I first moved to Fluvanna County several years ago, it was the same thing: People had been around a long time. Waving on the roads – one or two fingers would do if you were driving – was customary, the presumption or norm being that somehow, everyone there knows everyone else – or their kin.

What’s interesting to me, though, are experiences I’ve had where the friendly gestures extend to strangers on what seems like outstretched good faith. I’ve noticed that in three distinct places:

1) in the cockney areas of East London, where I lived as a child – women at the fruit stands calling everyone “Love” and “Ducks” and “Duckey,” brightly inclusive, even of us odd Americans

2) in some rural areas of “the South,” where the cliche of “Southern hospitality” has its roots, perhaps – “Honey” applied to me, an obviously nonnative with a Californian accent -

and now, 3) I’ve noticed people on the bus interacting with familiarity, even when I know they are meeting for the first time. The thing is, though, my “stranger” status seems more problematic than in the other two examples. I feel very, very conspicuously white.

Yesterday, on the bus, the chipper lady next to us similarly seemed to know everybody on the bus, and called one of them, a woman as old as herself, “baby girl.” “hey, baby girl!”

This made me want to call other people baby girl and to be called baby girl, even though I’m clearly not a baby or a girl, because it seemed so loving, so sweet. I have it as one of my goals to always see other people as former infants, to remember how we all start off and retain in the core of us very innocent, tender beings who want to be held and crave love.

I don’t come from a class/race background that sprinkles conversations with the sweet nothings of Honey, Ducks, or Baby Girl. In fact, I was coming of age in a time when terms like that were suspect – elements of a patriarchal system we were being taught to resist. Don’t call me Baby.

But man, I like the loosness, the casual aspects of these cultures. I’m sick of the uptight middle class brigrade of Appropriateness and Reserved Respect. I would like to request that everyone start honking and waving and calling each other tender names. Next time you see me on the street, wave, will you?