DOES `HAVE A GOOD DAY' RESONATE WITH YOU?

Resonate seems to be the new buzz word going around. Something a candidate says in New Hampshire doesn't resonate in Georgia, or a slogan coined in Texas doesn't resonate in California. If it weren't for these every four years political spasms we might never get a new word to bandy around. In political shorthand this means, "I can't hear you, Bub," although the words may be loud and clear.

When such a word or phrase catches on and spreads like wildfire, one naturally is curious about who started it.

In the case of our Missouri slogan, "You've got to show me," we know exactly who started that and where and when. It is easier to trace phrases than single words. Phrases are more personally coined. Words are free. That's not to say that two people at any given time couldn't be putting together the words into an identical phrase. Sometimes I think I am the one who started, "Have a nice day." Want to kill me?

A decade or so ago the Peace Pilgrim stopped at my house to attend a Writer's Guild meeting. Remember her, a middle-aged or over woman walking across America calling herself the Peace Pilgrim. Someone brought her to my house as a guest. Although I couldn't see how just walking across America without stopping to lecture, or do something, could promote peace, when she left, I distinctly remember saying, "Well, you have a nice day."

I can't remember having even subliminally heard the phrase before but remember being somewhat pleased at my farewell words, since I wasn't wholly in accord with her project a lone woman walking across the continent with a label "Peace for Trouble Pilgrim" on her garment. Seemed like a lightning rod to me.

I don't know whatever became of her. Perhaps she, too, had liked my parting words and used them again and again all the way across America. A cock-eyed story? Well, things have to start somewhere.

Soon I heard the phrase "resonating" everywhere. An aunt calling from California, a cousin from Texas, a friend from Atlanta all ended their conversation this way.

Soon rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief (actually writing it on a mirror with lipstick), doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs were saying it. It was a new form of goodbye.

Then one day I decided that I really wasn't the originator of the expression, that it had seeped into my vocabulary by spontaneous osmosis. Does seeped and spontaneous go together?

It would be a great expression if the barnac~les of banality hadn't become so attached to it.

So when we say it, let's think what we mean by it. Could it be, "I wish that you would have no pain this day, that you will have food and shelter and family, that you know what it is to love and be loved?" Can it mean, "I wish that today you are harboring no grudge, for a grudge can dim life into twilight?" I would that it would mean, "I wish you to know that should you stumble in any area of life there is always a New Beginning, something better up ahead." I would want it to mean, "I wish you success," the kind that Thoreau defined thus: "If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-smelling herbs is more elastic, more starry, more immortal that is your Success." I would want it to mean, "I wish you to be pleased and content with yourself" if you define it as Charles Cotton did: "How calm and quiet a delight is it, alone, to read and meditate and write, by none offended, and offending none. To walk, ride, sit or sleep at one's own ease, and, pleasing a man's self, none other to displease."

If any of the above is what you mean when you say, "Have a good day," it will resonate with me.

REJOICE!