A cashier at a café at Johnson Country Community College (Kansas, USA), where I spend a few hours most days these days, inspired me to share something I read earlier this year by a friend of a friend. The cashier explained how some people, while they order and pay for their breakfast or lunch or snack with him, chat on their cellphones and toss debit or credit cards at him, never making eye contact or otherwise acknowledging him as a person. An essay by a friend of a friend on the importance of greetings came to mind, and I thought I’d share it. Here goes…

Mr. Awoonor — poet, diplomat, statesman, scholar and cultural icon in his native Ghana — was killed in the terrorist attack by Somali militants on the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi. His death at 78 has shocked citizens in Ghana, the West African nation whose difficult beginnings and subsequent steadying he accompanied and chronicled.