The people you meet
VIEWPOINT
By RALPH HARDIN
Evening Times Editor
As someone who grew up with “Sesame Street” on the TV every time it came on (there were only like five channels back then, so your choices were limited), I fondly remember a reoccurring skit on the show called “The People in Your Neighborhood” that introduced kids to the many types of folks you might run into from time to time. It went, “Who are the people in your neighborhood, in your neighborhood, in your neighborhood. Oh, who are the people in your neighborhood? They’re the people that you meet, when you’re walking down the street. They’re the people that you meet each day…” And then there would be some dialog between various kids and muppets and adults highlighting someone like a police officer, or a mailman, or a teacher or whoever, and then they’d do a verse specific to that person.
We are right at the three-year anniversary of the time our neighborhoods (and our whole world really) got put on lockdown. Suddenly, we were encouraged to stay from the people in our neighborhood.
I don’t know about you all, but I got pretty used to not going out and about. I still had to mask up and do my job,
See VIEWPOINT, page A15 VIEWPOINT
From page A4
go grocery shopping, and take care of other essential services (while staying six feet apart, of course). Now, three years later, as we are all basically “back to normal” around here, I’m starting to get back into the swing of being social again. On a recent trip to Walmart, I happened to run into our county judge, a guy I went to school with and someone from church.
And just the other day, I was out walking and a guy I used to work with pulled up beside me and we had a full-blown conversation.
And yesterday, a repair man came by the house to give me an estimate on some work I’m having done. Once the “business” part of our interaction was done, we had a chat about some of the people we both knew out in Earle and such. Those kinds of interactions are something I guess I took for granted before COVID-19 hit, and now I think I am starting to better appreciate the importance of human interaction and I think we could all use a little chit-chat… with the people in our neighborhood.
