The Man of Many Greetings

Each morning the hostel offered free breakfast in the cafeteria.  There was a small room where one could get cereal, muffins, bagels, and orange juice.  As I waited in line behind the rest of the hostellers, a portly, bearded fellow would approach me without fail and repeat his morning mantra:  “Give me a good morning in a language other than English.”  I later overheard that the man’s name is John. 

John wore a black shirt with red lettering on the back that said:  YES, I WORK HERE.  His job was to restock the breakfast fare, to facilitate the line, and to ensure that nobody placed a whole bagel into the toaster, the type with a rolling track that engulfs bagels and spits them out from a chute below.  Surprisingly, some hostellers needed constant reminders to cut the bagel before toasting it.  Failure to follow this procedure would result in two disasters.  The first is a fire, and the second is having bagels that can’t be toasted.  Due to the simplicity of John’s work and due to the eclectic ecosystem of nationalities eating breakfast before him, John seized the opportunity to become a polyglot when it comes to greeting people before noon.       

I was caught off guard the first time he asked me to say good morning in a foreign language.  As a general rule, I am not highly social before I’ve eaten breakfast, and due to my solitary nature I usually avoid eye contact.  However, I played along with his silly game.    

“Bonjour,” I answered. 

Satisfied with my response, John proceeded to ask the person behind me, and the person behind him, and so on.  He even double-checked to make sure that those already seated gave him an answer.  Bonjour, Guten morgen, Buenos dias, Bom dia——these were passwords to enter his domain.

The next morning I decided to be more creative.  When I was a student, a small part of me always wanted to please my teachers with my responses so they could shower me with praise.  Remnants of this desire still linger within me, and, after all, the cafeteria in some ways resembled a classroom, with John as the teacher, mainly because he was asking questions and insisting they be answered.  After I stepped into the line for breakfast, John repeated his daily query to me. 

“Maakye,” I said. 

“Machi?” John looked puzzled.  “What is that?”

“It’s maa-chi.  It’s Twi.  It’s a Ghanaian dialect.”

“Tree?  Are you making this up?” 

“No.  I assure you it’s true.  I’ve been there myself.”

He seemed sour at being bested at his own game, and he seemed hesitant to let me pass.  John did not ask for clarification on the pronunciation.  Instead, he seemed convinced I created a fake language to mock him. 

This clearly was more than a game to John.  I witnessed him approaching an Asian woman.  He asked her whether she was Chinese, Korean, or Japanese.  “Chinese,” she said.  John then told her good morning in her native language.  He made a charade of his linguistic skills.  He wanted people to know that he could speak a miniscule percentage of several languages.  To make his presence even more overbearing, he took his antics even further. 

He whipped out a giant black and yellow book:  Spanish For Dummies.  He flipped to a page to get his bearings and proceeded to butcher a sentence in Spanglish.  He hovered over an old man sitting down and asked him how to pronounce a certain word.  The old man hardly spoke any English, so, after reading the sentence in Spanish, he merely laughed at the rest of John’s comments. 

I could tolerate this spectacle as long as he remained a safe distance from me, but John preferred to be interactive with the service.  In addition to his instructions to prevent burning bagels, John saw himself as a match-maker, a human Facebook responsible for jump-starting connections. 

While I was engaged with a banana nut muffin, John slapped a hand on my shoulder and addressed the three ladies sitting to my right. 

“Has my friend introduced himself to you?” John asked.

A Dutch woman to my immediate right said that, yes, I had spoken with them earlier, which was true.  I overheard the Dutch woman asking her German friends how to say good morning in French. I explained to them that in French, you say good day as a greeting instead of good morning.

After John walked away to pester someone else, the Dutch woman turned to me and said, “He is funny.” 

I considered the nature of John’s character.  Although he may be overstepping certain boundaries and he could be considered borderline annoying, John had a point.  Even though the cafeteria was full, many of the hostellers were eating in silence.  A handful, including myself, hid their faces behind paperback books.  Some held up their smart phones and used Facebook as a shield to block their neighbor’s gaze.  A few groups managed to roll into a conversation about the differences of life here and there. 

Before my eyes and beyond the pages of my book was a multi-cultural contact zone.  People from all over were concentrated in a single room.  Every one of us traveled from different homes, different countries, different environments with different ecosystems, and for a brief period we all shared the same space.  This was an opportunity to discover different lifestyles, to hear tales from foreign lands, and to make far-away friends to justify even having a Facebook.  Yet only a select few took advantage of this.

When did we stop talking to our neighbors?  Somewhere in my memory there is a clear break between wanting to belong and preferring to be alone.    

When I rode the school bus to elementary school, I remember that I would sit next to anyone without making a fuss.  I wouldn’t mind sharing a seat as long as my seat-mate didn’t smell or as long as his butt didn’t take up too much room on the bench.  On the way home, I remember hanging over the seat-backs and engaging in over-enthusiastic conversations with my friends.  We were brimming with excitement to escape the boredom of the classroom, and now we had the rest of the day to waste however we pleased.  Energy long dormant erupted from our bodies, out of our mouths in overly loud mutterings.  Our words shrieked like peacocks; the boys wanted to stick out and be rambunctious so the girls would notice us.  We may not have understood why our bodies and our uncontrolled hormones coerced us to act in certain ways, but we liked to make noise together.       

I also remember buying my first iPod as a teenager in the early 2000s, when they took over the market and immediately made standard mp3 players uncool.  Before I bought my iPod, I carried around a gold Walkman CD player and listened to my music with the ear-muff headphones with the cushy sheaths that were easily torn.  But I had to carry my CD player and ensure I had a change of music.  Listening to music was somewhat of an ordeal compared to clipping an iPod to a belt or an armband, or storing it in a pocket.  I could take my music with me everywhere I went, and I did.  

Even when I went to family gatherings, I always kept one ear-bud in.  If I didn’t care to listen to what was going on, I could tune out the world.  But if someone needed my attention, I could respond.  Now I didn’t need anybody to talk to me.  Someone sang into my ear, and I didn’t have to make eye contact with this stranger.  I was only half-there.  

I know I’m not the only one who did this.  There’s a stereotype of teenagers portrayed in movies.  He usually has long bangs that dangle in his face, and he’s wearing headphones.  Each time the parent tries to get his attention, he rips off the headphones in mild disgust and says, “What?”  My brother did this as well.  So did my cousin.  We were all listening to different songs together, not saying a word to each other.

I’m sure technology plays a major role in the hermitization of modern urbanites, but there must be other forces that prevent neighbors from exchanging hellos.  Recently, I went for a run around my neighborhood.  As I passed a woman walking toward me, she clutched her purse.  She immediately judged me as a potential thief.  When I reached my street, I tried to make eye-contact with and acknowledged a woman in her garden.  I passed within a few feet of her and nodded, but she paid me no mind.  

I don’t know any of my neighbors by name.  I could not imagine living in a place where neighbors welcome newcomers with apple pies or Jell-O desserts.  If I ran out of sugar while making cookies, I would run to the store several miles away before knocking on a stranger’s door a few feet away.  When I walk home at night, I look over my shoulder to make sure nobody is following me.  There have been times I’ve been walking on the sidewalk at night, and someone will be walking toward me.  When they see me, they’ll cross the street to avoid approaching me closely.  I’ve done this maneuver a few times as well because after the sun goes down I assume everyone is out to mug me, stab me, or shoot me.  I’m sure that not every neighborhood is like this.  I’ve taken walks in the middle-of-nowhere in the sticks where people wave to you as they drive by in their pick-up trucks.

As impersonal as our world seems to be, there are still folks out there who will greet you and wish you a good morning.  I know for a fact there’s a man in D.C. who does this on a daily basis, in several different languages.