I don’t know if this is just a New England thing or what, but people do not look well to me. It’s been a looooong winter here in New England (currently 42 degrees with light snow in Nashua, NH), but it’s like this every year. We know this. March is a winter month and it’s foolish to expect anything else, even with global warming. You can easily get snow on Easter Sunday. Hell, I’ve seen snow on Mother’s Day.

But this is different. A lot of people look miserable to me. An older woman with a walker was my cashier at Marshall’s yesterday. At age 65+, she has a job that requires her to stand up—for hours. Can she not retire? Is she one of the millions of Americans whose retirement plan is “work til I die.”

I have no idea of the political affiliation of strangers, so maybe this has nothing to do with the erosion of democracy or ascendent authoritarianism, but it does remind me a bit of my trip to the Soviet Union in 1987. Nobody smiled there. Everyone looked…grey (for lack of a better word). If they did smile, you could see that their teeth were horrible. They did not have American smiles.

I have done a fair bit of traveling and I can tell you that we tend be the warmest smilers in the world. And as a rule, we have fantastic teeth. (Maybe it was the fluoride and all the other public health initiatives we benefited from as kids.) But I’m seeing far fewer smiles lately. And more people are missing teeth.