The Accidental Embrace

One Moment More - Mindy Smith (mp3)
Leviathan Bound - Shearwater (mp3)

On Tuesdays, it is my parental duty to pick up one of my three chillens from her piano lessons and schlep her to soccer practice. Last Tuesday, I got delayed by a massive traffic pile-up on the Interstate mere miles from reaching my daughter.

Because my default mode is to push punctuality to its limit, any unexpected delay is certain to send me into an ulcerated hissy-fit, and this was no different. I hit the wheel, I murmur expletives about people who can’t drive or must not be in any friggin’ hurry or don’t believe in God, whatever might offer me some kind of balm for my own tension and misery.

As I approach an off-ramp and the salvation of a short-cut, I see it ahead of me. A dark blue Pontiac or an Oldsmobile in the second lane, its entire front end crushed like a Blutarsky Coke can, the hood taking the shape of a narrow A-frame roof, oil and other car fluids pooled up, as if the car were a gunshot victim slowly bleeding out on the asphalt.

The first thing that comes to mind is that the second car was missing. What about the car the driver rear-ended? Where did it go? As I’m looking around for it, my eyes catch a human form on the edge of the interstate. The form was actually two people, embracing one another so tightly it was as if they were forcing their bodies to become a single form. The woman was facing away from me, but you could see by the movement of her black track suit that her body was heaving and convulsing as she cried into this man’s chest. The man wore a white windbreaker, and his ballcap was backwards, and they embraced in front of an undamaged maroon truck some 15 yards from the destroyed automobile.

Logic and the scene suggested this was her boyfriend, husband, brother, a close loved one. Yet when I first saw them, and even now, I imagine them as strangers. I imagine that this man, having witnessed this terrible wreck, pulled over to help. He went to the car and patiently helped her out and over to the side of the road. Her legs wobbly, her brain in a jelly-fied shock, he held her strange arm and her strange hand and led her to safety.

Then, several minutes later -- long enough for me and my traffic to arrive on the scene, but before the police could make it -- I imagined that she begins to pull out of the fog of shock, realizing she had almost lost her life, possibly leaving behind children or family not to mention friends and an entire collection of the connections and accomplishments that make up one’s existence, and she began to weep uncontrollably. And this man takes her into his arms, not out of any remote selfishness, but rather because to have stopped to help and not have offered his chest and the comfort of his embrace would have meant failing her somehow.

A car behind me had to honk at me. I can’t remember a time I’d been so entranced by what amounted to rubbernecking.

After creeping past the scene and reaching my destination minutes later, I found myself so very grateful to have arrived that I gave both of my children the kind of overlong hugs that raise child eyebrows with that What’s up with Dad today? look, hugs with origins and motives you keep to yourself and hope one day your children will understand.

As my younger daughter pulled back to look up at me, I imagined the accident victim, looking up after several minutes of the kind of crying that exhausts every last calorie from the body, to thank this man. She wouldn’t even be ashamed of how things might look or care how uncomfortably close her body was to some strange man’s.

And, for just that one minute, she would fall in love with him. Not in any kind of shameful way, not in a way where she couldn’t go home to her significant other and hold him while grateful that the blood continued to pump through her body. She would love him the way humans are capable of truly loving one another, sans sex or romance or even gender. A love borne because we see a deep and powerful tenderness in one another, and because we can know in moments like these that life is precious and connections are precious and people, for all we do to fuck each other up, are amazing creatures full of inexplicable and sometimes unfathomable compassion.

This encounter occupied perhaps 120 seconds of my life. It could populate decades’ worth of Thanksgiving prayers.

The Smallest Gestures

Thom Yorke--"Nice Dream (live)" (mp3)

So, I'm sitting in the parking lot at the Rave movie theater on Friday night, waiting to pick up my daughter and her friend after their second viewing of Twilight. I'm kind off in a side lot, parked in a row behind a sweet little BMW convertible, a 2-seater. And, of course, as all of the groups of people begin to file out from the 7ish movies, I'm wondering idly who is driving that thing.

An asshole, I'm pretty sure. It's too well-kept, too flashy, a bit too-middle-life-crisis for my taste, but then I'm in a '95 Camry with darkened ghetto windows that have half peeled off and two broken front doors that can only be opened from the outside, so maybe I'm just jealous.

I see the couple long before they get to the car. They're about my age, maybe a little younger, both are casually well-dressed, him in pressed jeans. She's wearing dark pants and a light blouse and a kind of rugged lightweight winter coat, and is a attractive woman. I don't think they're married; I'm not sure why. Sometimes you just get that sense. He unlocks their doors with his key button about 30 feet from the car and walks to his side. And then here's the odd thing: just before she opens her door and gets in, she looks back at me and smiles.

Now, there is nothing more to be made of this than what was there. It was a smile--not a come on, not an "I wish you were him," nothing at all like that.

But, you know, people don't have to smile, and many of them don't. I feel kind of like Holden Caufield saying this, but when she smiled, 'It killed me.' I just like the idea that there are people whose immediate reaction when they see another person is to smile. I hope I'm like that. Or can become like that.

Because the alternative is repellent. Do you ever walk down the hall of your office and encounter a colleague that you never know whether he or she is going to make eye contact let alone smile let alone respond in any way if you greet him or her? I mean, really, what the hell is up with that?

Give me the stranger any day who, though about to get into a very nice car and probably finish off the evening in some wonderful way, glances my way and probably sees a father sitting in a dark parking lot on a Friday night who would rather be doing a million other things but who is waiting for his children to come out of a movie, and with an immediate feeling of sympathy or empathy, smiles. I've thought about that smile for days, even though I can't quite remember the woman who did it and had to make up details.

The smallest gestures are the ones that matter; the big ones are for everyone to see. Hers, well, let's face it, she doesn't even know if I saw it.

Thom Yorke's live performance is from one of Neil Young's Bridge Benefit concerts.

Do You Wanna Touch?

Dirty World - Traveling Wilburys (mp3)

We humans are touchy creatures. We're touchy about people touching us, and we're touchy about touching other people. If our skin (and nature) is sensitive, it's especially alert to having the right or wrong people making contact.

For better and worse, I'm a touchy person. There's something in me that feeds off making physical contact with friends or acquaintances when I'm in conversation. It's not a necessity, and I won't go out of the way to feed some desperate need. But all things being equal, there's something empowering and energizing about making (non-sexual, non-aggressive) physical contact with another person. A hand on the shoulder. A pat on the back. A slight pseudo-punch on the arm. Or, in the rarest circumstances, a hug. Yes, hugs are very, very good, but they can also be horrifically awkward if done in the wrong circumstances, so guys tend to go with the "Half-Hug," also known as one arm around the shoulder with both males facing in the same direction.

On Wednesday night I was out with a group of female coworker pals, and the touchy nature of coworkers was the center of discussion. One of our coworkers has a habit of touching both male and female coworkers in very awkward ways. Nothing criminal, mind you, just icky.

A finger "tickle" above the beltline. The smirking tug of a ponytail. A very brief back/neck rubbing. We were criticizing these things and the awkward feeling they create, and my guilty conscience was going haywire, because he's only slightly more touchy than I... but I have the benefit of being scrawny and pathetically harmless-seeming while he's larger and gives off that slightly icky vibe.

When I confessed my fear of hypocrisy, my perceived harmlessness and secure marital status seemed to be key factors in why my attempts at touch were not taken in the same negative manner.

In the rational part of my mind, I get it. Most of us have this electronic security system in our bodies, and that system goes off in different ways when different people touch us. As healthy and beneficial as hugs can be, in theory, some hugs do nothing but cause that security alarm to blare inside us. I'm fortunate that my touchiness doesn't caure that alarm to go off in others very often. That I'm making contact in very obvious, non-sexual ways does not, in and of itself, exonerate me.Nor does the fact that my aim is true and my intentions pure, because in these matters, motives are meaningless and perception from the touched party is everything.

Still, it does make me just the slightest bit sad for my touchy coworker. He wants his touch to be healthy the way hugs are healthy. I doubt -- although I can't be 100% certain -- his intentions are any more nefarious or lecherous than mine, but something about his approach sets off those alarms.

We all need human touch. We all need hugs. Those of us who get more hugs and have more physical contact with our counterparts and allies tend to live healthier and happier lives. It sucks that some of us are ickier than others. Unlike the fairy tales, sometimes frogs are just frogs. They'll never turn into Prince William (or, at left, Vladimir Putin).

Sometimes we feel icky when someone touches us because our bodies are smart, and sometimes they react in a defensive way because of concerns much deeper than someone's size or looks.

And sometimes, unfortunately, life and the human response system just ain't fair.

"Dirty World" is from the Traveling Wilburys' debut album and can be found on iTunes or Amazon.com's site. "Carnival Game" is from Cheap Trick's 1997 eponymous album, and I could only find it on iTunes. It took a lot of willpower to post none of these songs: "Human Touch" by Springsteen, "Human Touch" by Springfield, and "Do You Wanna Touch Me?" by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts.