When I wish someone a happy birthday and they reply, "On your life!" or "On your life!" I feel a small thrill of satisfaction, a little warmth. Satisfaction and nostalgia and comfort and joy. See how easy it is to make me happy with such a brief expression. All this happens to me because my father has been dead for so many years that he's become a thing in my memory in a collection of small gestures, of simple but fading words, like this reply: "On your life," which means so many things. It means that you want to spend the years you're celebrating and the ones ahead of you accompanied by the person who's wishing you a happy birthday.
I feel a similar emotion if someone remembers to say "Happy Birthday" to me the day before my birthday—a sacred custom in my house when I was little. Or if, when someone asks, "What should we do?", someone else replies, "Sell the house and rent out."
Every language has this popular phraseology that makes it unique and that transmits to us an indispensable legacy for building ourselves and for knowing we are connected to a culture and a tradition. I imagine that, in this globalized world, most languages are losing these idioms, which are being replaced by simpler, more elemental ones with a universal appeal. They tend to be short, bare, and cold expressions, precisely so that everyone can adopt them. All of us, especially the youngest, are tempted to incorporate this kind of wildcard that saves us thinking and makes us feel close to speakers from other places.
But where do the genuine expressions we are losing—right now at breakneck speed—end up? I imagine them filling a trunk of gigantic proportions. A bundle full of useless phrases that, when it's full, someone will lock and throw into the sea.
Perhaps this lament will make someone laugh or irritate them. Perhaps they'll call me a crybaby. But no one will ever get it out of my head that, in reality, we're busy filling chests with priceless treasures only to end up throwing them away out of sheer laziness.
I don't know if, on a personal level, we can do much. But perhaps we can: little by little the sink fills up, and more greens ripen. It's not about making doves fly, but I find it hard to resign myself to the fact that day by year it pushes and down it goes.
If we don't remedy this, this is going to be bad for erasing, we're heading down the road to stony ground. It would just be a matter of looking at each other a little when we talk. To remember and recover that expression that dances around in our heads because our grandfather used to say it: it's about look at me and don't touch me, tie heads, between too little and too much, it's late and it wants to rain, do kindness, sack and pears, legs, help me, make a thought. They are understandable and simple phrases, and there are plenty to choose from. Let each of you pick the ones that are most familiar and provoke that pleasant shiver I mentioned at the beginning.
Maybe someone will look strange or tell you that you're old-fashioned (because it won't occur to them to call you bouquets anymore). But, as my grandmother María would say: that's it, rai!
