How to Give a Hug
by Howard Richard Debs
It’s been forever
since we did it.
Today my twin
granddaughters
became teenagers.
Last time I saw
them in person,
it was their grandma’s
turn to have a birthday
I won’t tell which one.
Let’s just say she was not
yet a teen herself
when Bill Haley &
His Comets hit number one
with “Rock Around the Clock”
and Twinkies had been
packed in school lunchboxes
for a pretty good while before
she came along.
Her birthday this time around
coincided with a year’s
worth of pandemic,
still keeping us apart,
from family, friends, those
dear to us, the ones we love.
So on that occasion
we only saw the twins briefly
masked and social distanced
on our driveway; one of them
baked a cake which we rationed,
savored for quite a while,
sweet pieces of recollection
of how it used to be.
I read an article about
all this, it states that touch
is the only sense crucial
to humans’ survival.
This day, with our CDC
vaccination cards filed
carefully away, out of practice
for sure, we reached
with arms wide encircling
each child pressing them
close, holding them as if
we would never let them go.
PHOTO ART: Hugs and Kisses Banner by Maya Moody, used by permission.
NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: Some things seem instinctive, natural. Until you can’t do that thing, until it is precluded, taken away. Then you have to in a sense relearn it. I try in my writing to call attention to that which is mostly not fully acknowledged about common and ordinary things we do. That even the elemental act of a hug is built layer upon layer of what comes to make it special. The physical act itself is accompanied in the back of our mind maybe with the remnant of the taste of a birthday cake, a fondly remembered bite of a Twinkie from long ago perhaps, a recollection of dancing with someone in our life to a favorite song many years before. Touching is certainly one thing essential to our being human. Many of us surely more fully recognize how important this and other kinds of human interactions are out of the sad experience of this pandemic; hopefully, we will not soon forget what we have come to better appreciate, what we have learned about what really matters during this unprecedented time.
AUTHOR’S PHOTO CAPTION: Me hugging the twins, now teens; it will always be a special hug for me, on a special day for them.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Howard Richard Debs is a recipient of the 2015 Anna Davidson Rosenberg Poetry Award. His essays, fiction, and poetry appear internationally in numerous publications. His photography is featured in select publications, including in Rattle online as “Ekphrastic Challenge” artist and guest editor. His book Gallery: A Collection of Pictures and Words (Scarlet Leaf Publishing), is the recipient of a 2017 Best Book Award and 2018 Book Excellence Award. His latest work Political (Cyberwit.net) is a nominee for the 2021 Eric Hoffer Awards. He is co-editor of New Voices: Contemporary Writers Confronting the Holocaust, forthcoming in later 2021 from Vallentine Mitchell of London, publisher of the first English language edition of the diary of Anne Frank. He is listed in the Poets & Writers Directory.
Silver Birch Press 