My message to my friend had been this: “I found something that is similar to the gift I gave you.” Nancy Mahanes called me back and said, “I got your message, and I had to call you before I ended my night.” I had recently spent ten days in Sellersburg, Indiana, dog and housesitting, and had visited with Nancy, who lives across the Ohio river in Louisville, Kentucky. We had talked of a life with books, poetry, art, children and grandchildren, and I had helped with some chores around her house.
In her return call, Nancy told me about the day that had bedeviled her. “Nothing was working as it should,” she told me. She detailed the failures of the electronic devices that keep her in contact with the world, with one thing after the other having misfired and malfunctioned. Finally, in frustration, she had called her son and said to him, “I’m having a bad day; can you send me a hug?” A frisson of recognition shot through me when she said that, and I told her that I would explain its origin after I telling her what I’d found.
Years ago, I had given Nancy a magnifying glass that had been a present to me from the employees of the photo studio that shot the images for the catalogs that I worked on as an advertising art director for a St. Louis department store. The gifts were usually sent at Christmas time, and were often silver-plated Swid Powell pieces. I loved the magnifying glass, which is why I gave it to Nancy. When I visit with her and sit at her kitchen table, the glass is to my right. But another Swid Powell piece that I loved had been lost in my apartment for about five years: a letter opener. I finally found it while rummaging for something else and I promptly called Nancy to tell her. When she returned the call and told me of her disastrous day and her need for a hug, I told her about a man with whom I’d had a long conversation about, as the poet wrote, “the common wages of (our) most secret heart(s).”
The man is a friend who has helped me with some mechanical mysteries, and someone with whom I have had some emotionally revealing conversations. We enjoy sitting and talking to each other, for we have had some similar experiences, and have both managed to find decency through the suppression of raging and brutal impulses. We sat talking, the man and I, and I was again amazed to hear him speak of his childhood, a twin of my own. His father was mine, a wrecked and wretched man who, in his misery, delivered misery to his children. His childhood had been endured and survived in a nearly identical manner to my own. When he finished speaking, I said to him, “I guess I’m not alone.” We spoke of the triumph of the spirit, the rise of our “better angels,” and when we were to part, we agreed that the sharing had been fulfilling. He stood to leave, turned to me and asked, “Can I give you a hug?” and I said, “yes.” We opened our arms to each other, this man and I, two people whose commonality went beyond the bodies we occupied, whose separate experiences were conjoined in hope and redemption and we hugged, shook hands and parted. Finding that letter opener had become the least important part of my day.
When my friend Nancy phoned me that evening, I told her: “I got a hug today, too.”