From the Editor’s Desk: Hello People (Premium)

Our recent move into an apartment has triggered all kinds of reevaluations, and as is always the case when you try something new, it’s opened our eyes to some differences—both positive and negative—that we had never previously considered. And while this is one of our more minor observations, it’s one that I’m almost obsessed with.

I know I described at one point how my wife and I would walk around the rural neighborhood of our previous house and I’m sure I made the claim that I was personally responsible for getting people to say hello to each other as they passed by. If not, let me be more emphatic on that topic: I know that I had a positive impact on the people in that neighborhood and I turned a previously silent and almost sullen group of people into a smiling, chatty group who now seem to understand how a tiny slice of interactivity can make the day a bit better for everyone.

Too much? Maybe. But in watching this transformation, I often wondered to myself why it was that people where we had lived previously to that, outside of Boston, were generally nice and greeted each other routinely, while those in rural Pennsylvania were not and did not. Was it a regional thing? A generational thing? I can’t say. I can only say that I spent a lot of time saying “hello”—or “hi,” or “good morning,” or whatever—to people I walked by, and that I observed the shift from silent suspicion to willing friendliness. And that I felt pretty good about it.

And then we moved.

We now live in a place called Macungie. It’s tiny, with about 3,000 residents, and is geographically surrounded by the much larger Lower Macungie in which we previously lived, with its 32,000 residents. Lower Macungie has no town center at all, and it is instead mostly farms that are now shifting into McMansion-y housing developments. But Macungie does have a town center, which is downtrodden and has a train track crossing right through it. Where Lower Macungie is made up of an upper-middle-class and rich population, Macungie is poor.

And I love it here. My wife and I found a nice walk that takes us through parks, the town center, and the little area of houses behind it, and we cross the forked Swabia Creek several times and have unexpectedly observed even more wildlife here than we did in our previous home. And that means we get to walk by lots of people, either walking themselves or sitting on their porches or whatever. And the cycle began anew.

Here, we’ve found the people to be friendlier than they were in Lower Macungie initially, which is interesting. We see older people walking, like us, and they always say hello. We also see some of the more downtrodden parts of Macungie, where a gristly old guy has yet to acknowledge our dopey greetings from his porch, preferring instead to stare at us intensely in silence. And there’s one home in our neighborhood with two disturbingly disparate lawn signs, one of which reads “Welcome” and the other which has an image of a gun pointed at us and explains that they do not call 911. That doesn’t feel very welcoming to us, but those people do leave a lot of their belongings outside their homes with no apparent fear of robbery.

And yet, Macungie is friendlier overall. There’s an old woman with a walker who lives in a retirement community we walk by, and we’ve waved to each other so many times I feel like we’re friends, despite her front door being 50 feet from the sidewalk and us having never spoken. Most of the people sitting on their porches are happy to see us. And we walk by a young family each morning that’s waiting for the bus, and we were greeted the other day by the son, who excitedly told us that it was his last day of school. I guess we’ll see them again in September.

The shift in attitude here made me wonder if there wasn’t some demographic component to one’s willingness to say hello to people you don’t know or only barely know. And in mentioning this to my wife, she told me something interesting that our son had been taught when he was very young. There are three kinds of people, he was told: people you know, strangers, and hello people. Hello people are, of course, the people we say hello to out in the world. Passersby. (Which is the plural of passerby, I had to look it up.) I’m sure he was taught rules for each, too, but it’s an interesting distinction.

In a weird coincidence, I happened to read one of those Q&A columns in a newspaper a few days later where an older person was lamenting that younger people, in their view, were not as polite and didn’t do such things as respond when the older person said hello to them. The person writing the column had whatever opinion about this, but I found the reader reactions to this more interesting because they touched on each of the reasons—regional, generation, demographic—that I had wondered about on my own. But one person noted that we live in a world that is perceived to be more dangerous now despite that not being true—we just have access to more news more readily, and bad news sells—and so of course kids these days are being taught to keep their distance.

That rings true to me, though I still think there are many reasons for the curious range of reactions one can get in making the smallest of connections with another human being. But none of this has changed my mind about it: I feel like it’s polite to acknowledge others and if they don’t reciprocate, that’s fine, and their prerogative.