On a Saturday morning, a few suburbs away from home, I am shopping in a produce store piled with lush peaches, avocados, tomatoes, cheeses, breads, pastries, sauces, condiments, fruits and flowers. It is a place of plenitude. Affable aproned humans are ready to help find the pomegranate molasses and fresh figs my special-occasion-recipe requires. Trolleys are politely steered by people with well-shod feet. The atmosphere is attentive and restrained.
A small commotion at the open doorway of the store catches my attention. A short man in a pork-pie hat marches across the threshold. He carries a small back pack and steps with an uneven gait. He has a sure message, calling out a gamely, 'Good morning! Good morning everyone!' He looks about with purpose as he enters the shop.
The staff behind the bread counter recognise him and call out their own hello. He continues with the energy of someone on a mission. 'Good morning young lady. Good morning young man.' He nods as he addresses people.
Initially no one replies, but eventually he gets some muted acknowledgements from bemused customers. When he comes past me, emboldened by his energy, I call a robust 'Good morning'. He does not directly reply, and I wonder if I have overstepped the mark, displaying too much exuberance in the try-hard way that seems to piggy back onto my nice-church-girl upbringing.
The man in the pork-pie hat keeps up his call and meets my eye from across the store. No offence seems to have been taken. It's amazing how rattling just saying hello can be in a restrained environment. He tips his hat. It seems designed for doffing. The hat is neat and lightweight with a narrow brim and a dark hatband. When he has completed a lap of the store's perimeter he threads his way through the crowd and leaves, still calling out as he goes.
It is such a rare thing to be greeted in this way for a non-commercial purpose. It seems the man in the pork-pie hat regards it as a civic duty to say hello to people. I think he's onto something.
This suburb used to be home to many people who were 'different'. When I was a child, our family briefly rented a house on one of the main roads. Often at the shops or tram stops were people who startled my childhood sense of 'normal' with postures, sounds and gaits I found strange.
"Saying hello is such a simple thing, but overlooked, mistrusted even, among strangers-who-could-be-neighbours."
My dad would always cheerily greet or return greetings as they moved about in herded clusters or disturbed solitude. My mother was more reserved and whispered to me not to stare, at the same time reassuring me and my little brother that all was well. She'd look up and give a quick nod and a quiet hello.
The-people-who-were-different lived in a huge institution on the hill. A far place to my child's eye. We never visited, the residents were the ones who came to the shared public space of the shops. They no longer live on the hill. Government policy and real estate values have seen them dispersed. Occasionally a hint of the former life of the suburb will reappear amidst the leafy security and large house blocks of the area.
The man in the pork-pie hat is possibly a survivor from that era, well dressed and confident; in the lingo of assessments he would be called 'high functioning'. Later I saw him treading intently across the pedestrian crossing. It was as if he was a messenger from a far place where people greeted one another as a matter of course
Saying hello is such a simple thing, but overlooked, mistrusted even, among strangers-who-could-be-neighbours. The capacity for joy, for crying out in a crowd without self-consciousness, the instinct to be glad or grateful and to signal this is often all but lost in a reserved security. Why upset the equilibrium of restraint by speaking? There is a possibility that you will say hello, initiate a greeting and then feel foolish because it is not returned — better not to risk it. Worse still, you might be greeted in a way that makes you feel uncomfortable.
Activist Carly Findlay has a rare skin condition, ichthyosis, and is often dealing with people's blunt shock and rude questions — even before they offer a greeting. Finlayson says her memoir is about 'ableism, media representation and beauty privilege'. Findlay says, 'The book is called Say Hello because that's what I want people to do, instead of ignoring me, looking shocked or scared, or making a rude comment about my face.' She's not asking for the be-polite-to-the-poor-disabled-people kind of greeting. Just say hello.
On Conversations for ABC radio recently, Sarah Kanowski interviewed author Samantha Wheeler about her book Everything I've Never Said. Wheeler has a daughter with a disability who cannot speak more than a few words. The book imaginatively portrays her daughter's experience. Kanowski asked the author what she would now tell her younger self, the self who had no contact with disability. Wheeler's advice was simply to say hello, to take the risk that the person may not want to respond or be able to, but to say hello anyway.
A greeting can go wrong, it is a risk. Not saying hello has an invisible cost — at worst erasure or indifference. What is gained can be more than the sum of its parts. A greeting does not have to be a pick-up line or a marketing strategy. Something in common is affirmed. Human connectedness makes its beginning with saying hello.
Julie Perrin is a Melbourne writer, oral storyteller and Associate Teacher at Pilgrim Theological College, University of Divinity.