It Looked Different on the Model - Laurie Notaro [85]
“I had a non-licking mother!” I cried.
“You had a non-licking mother!” he yelled.
Suddenly it all made sense. The hand-yanking. The anxiety. The Pooh shirt. The aversion to tall walls and sharp corners. The challenges to parking-lot kicking fights. All of the symptoms now came together. I had a non-licking mother, my genes had been turned off as a result, and I was nothing more than an anxiety-filled, jelly-bean-eating lab rat who couldn’t stand to be touched, even for free.
So it made sense to me that if my environment had turned my genes off, maybe I could get them to go back on. I decided to take it slow at first and try out some hugging. I hugged my neighbor Louise, after her dog died, and that went really well. I hugged my friend Jim after I hadn’t seen him in fifteen years and we met for dinner during Christmas vacation. Now, I want to make it clear that I was still very much at a beginning-hugger level; I was taking it slow and trying not to move too fast. I was not embracing, by any means. Hugs that had time parameters, like One-Mississippi Hugs. I gave out a couple more, although I couldn’t actually say they were changing my life and making me more of a licked rat. I was keeping it safe, keeping it in the family, so to speak, until one day when I got a little hug-cocky.
I was visiting Seattle for a couple of days and met a friend for coffee while I was there. We had both attended a creative-writing conference a year earlier; I got to know her and her husband and thought both were very cool, very nice people. We had a great time talking and drinking wine and I really enjoyed their company.
So I was thrilled when she said she had the afternoon free during my visit. We met and walked to a little café. As we were taking the last bites of our chocolate chip cookies a couple of hours later, it began to rain heavily, and just then my friend’s phone rang. It was her husband, who offered, very nicely, to come and pick us up so I wouldn’t have to walk back to my hotel in a downpour.
Now, that’s sweet, right? Isn’t that thoughtful and kind? That’s exactly what I was thinking, because even though I didn’t have that long of a walk, maybe a mile, I would have gotten soaked. As we pulled up to the front of the hotel, all of this was running through my mind, and certainly this met the parameters of a One-Mississippi Hug. No, I decided, just go for the handshake. Don’t get ahead of yourself. You’re not ready.
You’re not ready!
And I was firmly comfortable with my decision about the handshake or the wave as the car pulled to a stop. But the next thing I knew, I was reaching across the front of the car with my arms open toward the driver’s seat—although my momentum came to a sudden and jarring halt because I had neglected to take off my seat belt. Once I had been jerked back to reality, like I was in a log on Splash Mountain and someone quickly applied the brakes, I knew this had been a terrible choice, but I was in it now. There was no getting out; there was no abandoning the mission. You just can’t open your arms to someone, change your mind, and high-five them instead. Once freed from my restraints, I had no choice but to go back in and deliver a second attempt, but I hadn’t come close to mastering the art of positioning. Going in from the side angle, and basically lying over the console, I got my right arm around him but my left arm got all squished up against the side of the driver’s seat like a flipper, which I realized was moving wildly, as if I was patting him on the back with both hands, all while my friend watched the whole thing from the middle of the backseat. When I eventually retreated, it was clear that not only had he gotten a face-full of my slightly damp hair but that I had administered a Five-Mississippi Hug, and it was probably one of the Most Inappropriate Hugs on record (that was not given at a funeral to the person in the casket).
I’m not the only one in my family to breach the touching protocol, either, by the way. My father staged a coup around 2000