From the Editor’s Desk: Friendly (Premium)

A few months ago, I wrote about the "hello people," the strangers, passersby, and acquaintances that form an interactive part of the backdrop of our lives. Since then, my wife and I spent about three weeks in Mexico City, and we had some interesting interactions there that brought something into focus that will be obvious to many but is still, I think, important to explicitly acknowledge.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a good name for this. But it is possible for "hello people," the people we say hello to out in the world, to transition into friends or at least something closer to friends. This type of relationship can be a weird purgatory, of sorts, since most of these people, even those you see daily or at least regularly, will not make this transition. And that's fine, and perhaps even necessary. But it's always fascinating when they do.

As I wrote of our neighborhood in Mexico City, we feel at home there now and there is a growing collection of people whom we are friendly with and vice versa. We can walk a few blocks up the street and say wave and say hello to a dozen or more people, shop owners, restaurant owners and staff, whatever, as we go. Many are polite and wonderful in that uniquely Mexican way---"You are always welcome here," we've been told a few times, "this is your home"---but some are getting closer.

There's the restaurant co-owner we chat with a lot as he's incredibly nice and friendly and speaks perfect English, which I define after many years of international travel as not just fluency but understanding humor. The last time we saw him, he asked how we were doing, and I replied, "pretty bueno" in a purposeful mashup of our two languages. He laughed and I said I was "trying to work it into the local lingo," and that if everything went well, he could expect to hear it more and more around the neighborhood. He thought this was a wonderful idea.

And there is our favorite sushi restaurant, the best we've ever experienced, just a 7-minute walk from our apartment (and, go figure, across the street from the restaurant co-owned by the person described above). Having something that good so close to our place is incredible, of course. But getting to know the people there has been even better. The owner is amazing, a traveler with deep connections to Japan, but we're particularly close with the man and woman behind the sushi bar, both of whom are artists, and incredibly friendly. One speaks perfect English and the other speaks no English, and yet there is a curious connection between me and the latter, tied, I'm told, to how appreciative I am of him and his work.

We've had some "fun with language" moments there, too---the English speaker now jokingly encourages me to speak as much Spanish as possible---and we'll be back in town for the Spanish speaker's birthday in October, so we're plotting what we can do for him. But we go there a lot, speak with them a lot, and also speak with others near us at the sushi bar when it...