The Land of First Impressions

Buying groceries at Meijers.

Having come back to the city for a visit, I notice a form of heraldry in the way people present themselves; how they dress, behave, avoid direct eye contact, go about their business. In my small town in Vermont, everybody knows most of the people they meet on any given day, and most of us know quite a lot about each other too. So when we meet, it doesn’t matter much how we dress, unless it is an occasion that calls for some particular manner of dressing. We always have an archive of knowledge within which we can set each other. So I can be grumpy or peppy or taciturn, without fearing that anyone will think that that has anything central to do with the real me. The real me is more varied and complex, and has been seen, in varying aspects, by people over time.

When I worked in this city, I worked with a small, constant group of people, and so a similar accumulated history was built up around each of them. But now I am just visiting, and most days, as I go shopping, walking, doing my general chores, the people I encounter in stores and on the streets are people I have no recollection of having ever seen before. Indeed in most cases I probably never have seen them before, and since I do not plan to stay long, I expect I shall never see them again.

And so the social intercourse, trivial and functional, is conducted entirely on the basis of first impressions. I can tell who the check-out clerk is by the uniform and where they stand. The fellow purchasers treat me, as I treat them, partly as a stereotype, and partly according to these first impressions, broadcast by the heraldry I speak of. They don't seem to pay any attention to me, but I have no doubt they scan and assess me to the same degree that I monitor them. There are ugly fat people, dress-for-success young women, middle-aged men whom I completely ignore. People who look poor, and people who look bored. Pre-occupied business people and people with a certain hauteur. And, of course, the not yet self-conscious little children, some charming, some pestilant, with their attached adults trying to keep them within the rules and trying to mask the fact that they are doing so.

And all of us are aware of the artificiality of this general anonymity. You can see that from the extreme glee people adopt when they do, unexpectedly, encounter someone they know. The greeting is as if something quite astonishing had happened - almost as if meeting someone socially whom you had not seen in years. It seems to call for more intensity of greeting than a mere acknowledgment of the familiar, such as happens at home as you pass a family member in the hall.

And perhaps this vigor of greeting is to undo the heraldry. To say to the ‘real’ person “Don’t pay attention to my exhausted appearance, or my embarrassingly expensive neatly pressed trousers, or the monstrous wrist watch” All these now irrelevant messages can be cancelled out by a display of genuine, slightly overdone, particular pleasure in the meeting.

And this serves to emphasize how clearly, once the familiarity has closed again, the hair, the makeup, the clothes, the way of holding yourself, the air of purpose and competence and organization, is a necessary act, put on to impress, or merely keep at bay, an unpredictable flow of human beings you really have no dealings with, except for a civilized non-aggression pact. Passing each other safely and unharmed is all that is needed. But that is a lot, and it is very much needed. Unless of course anyone makes such a strong and particular impression that you go out of your way to collect further impressions. Corroborating evidence. A relationship, perhaps. And that, of course, is also one of the possibilities being advertised.
© 2004 AJM