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...