Monday Manners: Hello, Stranger

This one comes straight from Ma Phillyist (aka Mamaist, aka Mommy, aka Mom, aka Mother, but only when I'm mad at her), who's been visiting the past few days. She's the one who always stressed the importance of manners to me. She also thinks that, in spite of my weekly manners column, five years of living on the East Coast has taught me a few manners that she wishes I hadn't picked up.

Oh, it's nothing big, really. It's not like living in Philadelphia has made me so unspeakably rude that my mother can't return to Texas and tell her friends about me. But the other day, as we walked up Broad Street, a street musician (albeit a bad one) stopped between songs to greet us. "Hello, ladies! And how are we this fine morning?"

"Hello!" my mother nearly drawled. "We're fine, thanks!"

I grabbed her arm and led her closer toward our destination. "Mother! In Philadelphia, we just keep walking."

"It's not like I stopped!"

"Still."

We walked a few more blocks, and then my mother broke the silence: "Well, I think it's just rude to ignore a person if he says hello. No matter why he says it."

Mamaist had a point. But the thing is, in Philadelphia, and indeed, in most big cities in the Northeast, you don't say hello to people you see on the street. You walk quickly, looking straight ahead or down at the sidewalk, avoiding eye contact at all costs, and never saying anything to anybody. I walk past people I know all the time, and people I know have walked past me, because of this practice. The only people who make a conscious effort to talk to other people on the street, it seems, work for Dialogue Direct.

When I first moved to Philadelphia, I'd say a quick hello to people with whom I made eye contact on the street. Most of those people looked at me like I was positively nuts, so I grew out of my lifelong habit really quickly. By the time my younger sister, Lindsay, came to visit after my first year of undergrad, I was already an old pro at not saying hello – a practice I had to explain to her when she told me that, during her morning run, she'd said hello to the runners headed toward her, and that more than one of them had quickened his pace.

But I'm not a northeasterner by birth. All of these "Yankee" behaviors (as my father would call them) that my mother observed in me, most notably this one, are things I've picked up over the course of the last five years. And I'm curious, Philly, as to why we don't say hello to people on the street – and my mother finds it completely baffling. Leave a comment with your thoughts: is it just generations of such behavior? Are people afraid they might fall madly in love with the person to whom they say hello? Are we just in that much of a hurry? Am I reading too much into this? Leave a comment with your thoughts!

Image via Flickr user dcJohn.