Someone passed my seat at the new location of my favorite cidery; I met this person at the cidery’s previous location. When she shared “Wonderland” with people, I was one of them. When she displayed her art, I was a viewer. And when she laid her head in a loving manner on her husband’s shoulder, I was a silent observer. And on this day in the cidery, she greeted me, and we exchanged the pandemic-necessitated elbows. But I pointed out to her that on a very recent occasion, she had hugged me. I mentioned that I had grown up in a non-hugging family and she responded, “I’m sorry.”
The air of my childhood crackled with the potential for violence, with beatings for mother and children alike. Once, my father found that his two sons — we hungry two — had eaten an entire loaf of bread and he stood us before a hot fireplace and in a quiet and menacing voice, lectured us until I escaped by passing out onto the floor. I woke to a beating and stood up, once more. My cousin told me that she understood that my father forbade my mother to hug me, saying that excess affection would make me “soft.” My mother apparently internalized that prohibition and recognized it even after her husband was gone from her household. Hugging was not a commodity shared by my immediate family.
When my best friend in high school introduced me to her family, her sister gave me a great enveloping hug. I stood stiffly within her arms as panic buzzed through me: Why is she touching me? Years would pass before I learned to accept the gift of the hug. I remember my mother enduring the embrace of her adult son for a brief period, then telling me, “That’s enough, Joni.” The lessons of terror endure. But her grandchildren could hug her until they melted into her flesh.
After my acceptance of the hug, I noticed that there are a variety of ways to hug. There is the side hug exchanged by people who are unwilling to have too much contact with one another; the man hug, where men give to each other the upper chest press accompanied by the vigorous back slap. The full-body hug, given in friendship and love, comes from and goes to, people who are not averse to intimate contact.
The sharp blade of this pandemic has severed the threads of contact, the casual exchanges of friendly touches. My good friend Paula Nicewanger is a medal-winning hugger but touches elbows with me when I climb into her car for our weekly trip to the cidery. I’ve not hugged my two oldest grandchildren in two years; my youngest grandchild, who lives with me, is pressed into constant “hug-service” to make up for the shortfall. When Jennifer Delgadillo said to me that she was sorry that I had grown up in a non-hugging family, I imagine that she was sorry for the lost joy, the kind she wields and dispenses.
I hope that we can again return to the exchange of friendship and love expressed by the hug, to once again believe that we are not endangering ourselves by holding a friend in our arms. And for my friend Jennifer, whose unrestrained gift to me was surprising and wonderful, I paraphrase a poem by Leigh Hunt: “Jenny hugged me when we met, jumping from the chair she sat in.” In this coronavirus environment that has stripped so many of us of so much of the human contact that we need, I can still say this:
“Jenny hugged me.”
cjon3acd@att.net