About Free Hugs

“P.C.”

contrived

wide-armed hugging homeless

pleads with me to look

offer to embrace

momentary opening up of who we are

too much beauty filling my mind and it just spills out

hesitation to share

open myself to whatever might come

sweet, uncertain hearts who took time to stop

to receive and give back

beauty and grace

Failure to thrive

Thanks to all of you.  Your words ran the gamut of thought and emotion that I felt, too, including the first cool comments.   I could identify with the people who passed by, ignored, or actively rejected the free hug.  I too (Sorry, Jen) found myself attracted to the beauty of the girl with the bright colored shirt, but while you, anonymous, were asking “what did she want” I was reflecting on my own (sorry again, Jen) physical attraction.  But the question of what these wanted, these young people with their signs, did honestly occur to me too, as I recall times we’ve traveled and been approached by aggressive panhandlers.  

So I have watched the video again and again, trying to understand why, despite these thoughts, that tears come as automatically as Pavlov’s dogs’ saliva. Something of it, I think, is the person who had sent it.  Bobbie knows loss, loss of three men whose embrace she felt.  And she’s a hugger, the kind who would hold her arms out and say, “Aw, C’mon,”  because she’d know the scared little boy in me, or the cynic, or the head-not-heart, and she’d know that I’d like it once I gave in, and she’d be right.   I’ve been like that all my life, hiding in my personal space, like the little kid looking out of the window at other kids playing ball.  Why?  Why did all of those people on the street pass by?  What is it that makes so many of us resist, resist the smile, the plea, the invitation?

Another thing that brings my own tears, I know, is the song.  And like DreamerJen it is Jeff Buckley’s voice that I hear in my head.  I’m riding in the car our son Chris and I have rented for a drive from his apartment in Barcelona for a week’s wandering through the north of Spain.  Kathy and the girls had encouraged me to come and visit him one on one, just dad and son time.  We’d been emotionally close all of our lives – no baggage, not issues, but Chris had been in Europe for ten years, and deep conversations were hard to come by.  We had been sitting at a table in a sunny square enjoying lunch when I received the call that my brother Dan had died, died on the street in St. Paul Minnesota, his heart stopped, his troubled, haunted heart.  We had grown up together.  He was the one playing ball; I was the one looking out the window.  He was the golden child, the good student, the Shortstop, the Quarterback.  But as life unfolded, my life came together and his came unraveled.  He had intentionally “climbed into a hole he could not climb out of”; our phone conversations were like me talking down to him there in his pit, unable to pull him out and trying to love him from up on the rim, where the sun was shining (and beautiful people with beautiful smiles offered “free hugs”). 

We are in the car, on the third day after he had died, and I had all along known in my head that I needed to be with my living son more than my dead brother.  But my heart ached, and my son’s ached with me.  He had brought along a few CDs that he thought I’d like.  I’d never heard Jeff Buckley.  He was singing “Corpus Christi Carol (click to listen) 

And on this bed there layeth a knight;

his wound is bleeding day and night

I wept as I listened to the words, blinking my tears, trying to read the lyrics on the CD jacket, my blinking as ineffective as windshield wipers in a downpour.  Corpus Christi: body of Christ, the Christ that Dan rejected, along with Hope and Gratitude, and anything that could not be proven or measured.  Rules of the Deep Hole.  I’m in church and Dan’s in the hole; I in my bright depth and he in his darkness.

Chris drove on.  Buckley sang on.  “Halleluiah” now, the song in the video.  Again I’m in church, it’s Pentecost and Kathy and the kids and I are in the cathedral in St. Augustine Florida, and the big, joyful choir is singing the Alleluias that we’d been missing in the Dark Hole of Lent.  Their song was celebrating our being pulled out of it, beaten death, and then I noticed something that I can still see now on my mind’s memory.  They “signed” a verse of the song, American Sign Language, for a hearing impaired group in front of the church.  And when they got to the Alleluias, the raised their hands, their pointing fingers swirling in circles with the “Whoopee!” motion.  “Yeah,” I thought.  “Yeah, Whoopee!”  We all joined in, Kathy and the kids and me, singing and whoopeeing.  It was Easter.  Death is dead.

And so when I watched the video, I watched it through tears.  I thought of hugs offered and hugs refused, hugs repressed and hugs enjoyed.  I thought of how I never made the trip to St. Paul.  Maybe I was afraid that he’d refuse to climb out of that hole, and that I’d give up hope that he would.  And I knew that what moved me most was the helplessness of the people offering the hugs, pleading, waiting, cajoling.  I ached with them.  And I sobbed when people finally gave in, reached up from their hole of political correctness and suspicion and privacy to accept the embrace, and oh, how I delighted in seeing the change on their face, and their liberation to return the embrace.

As I was typing this, I remembered a photo of Dan hugging me.  He stunk of beer, and I was embarrassed that he had slid from the starting lineup, that he looked at me as an interloper, vacillated between admiration and hostility when he looked at me.  Maybe when I saw those hugs, I noticed that some seemed so mutual, each participant feeling the kind of joy that we’ve been looking at.  And maybe when I looked at those hugs, I thought of this one, not quite genuine, because someone was holding back: me.

If you didn’t have a chance to see the video in yesterday’s blog, please please watch it now, and please comment too.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.