4-year-old boy brings North Carolina neighborhood together

Roman Butzlaff’s wave and quick "hey" became the first spark in a Concord, North Carolina, neighborhood that had not been living much like a neighborhood at all. The 4-year-old now starts many mornings eager to greet somebody, and that simple habit ended up reaching far beyond his own front door.

The chain began when Wade Fulgum, who lives across the street, walked over to meet the boy who kept waving. From there, the connection widened into regular visits and a new pattern of daily life around Roman, with neighbors stopping by to talk and showing up for the moments that fill a child’s calendar, from soccer games and basketball games to baseball games, swimming lessons and his preschool open house.

For Anna Butzlaff, the change came after a difficult stretch in the family’s life. She said Roman had been carrying an "inner loneliness" after his parents broke up about a year ago, when his father moved to Florida and his grandparents remained out of state. Roman’s cheerfulness, she said, had hidden what he was feeling, even as he kept greeting the people around him with that same small burst of friendliness.

At first, Anna Butzlaff said, the attention from neighbors felt strange because she barely knew them. She went along with it because Roman was happy, and the boy’s openness kept pulling more people in. By the time his birthday party came around, she said the only people she needed to invite were his senior-citizen neighbor friends, a sign of how quickly the social map of the street had been redrawn.

About a dozen neighbors have now been brought together around Roman, and many of them say they would have barely known each other without him. What started as one child’s habit of saying hello became a neighborhood ritual, and Anna Butzlaff said her son’s inner loneliness was gone as his "love thy neighbor" attitude spread from one doorstep to the next.