Vox

He Touched Me

THOSE governmental agencies having applicable jurisdiction have now decreed certain specifications for the design and construction of automobile bumpers. Actually, the agencies have "mandated" minimum standards, but the use of a noun as a verb bothers me almost as much as the thought of a massive bureaucracy trying to decide how to measure bumper efficiency.

As I understand the final decision, an automobile bumper must be so designed that the impact of a collision with a brick wall at a certain modest speed will be absorbed by the bumper without disturbing the automobile behind the bumper or the occupants of the vehicle's "passenger compartment." Therefore, somewhere in the United States there are groups of engineers driving automobiles into brick walls, bending bumpers, fenders, and possibly even drivers. But all this testing does nothing to measure automobile bumpers as a means of communication.

Bumper sticker epigrams and aphorisms are one of the few areas of public expression left to the vast number of people who do not get asked to contribute to the op-ed page or do not own their own magazines. The auto bumper serves the function of a wall in Peking or a soapbox in Hyde Park.

One particular bumper sticker message has intrigued me: "Have You Hugged Your Kid Today?" That message is somewhat of a challenge: Not all my kids are at home now, they have always been busy when they are home, and sometimes they are not huggable. Does an affirmative answer to that question mean that my family is happy, loving, considerate, and so skilled in interpersonal relations that each member can relate to every other but yet preserve his own space? If that is the point of the message, the author was an only child.

Once, on a California freeway, I saw a bumper sticker that read, "Have You Hugged Your Sailboat Today?" We should hug, pet, and cherish those things most dear to us, and if one of those things happens to be a sailboat, then a meaningful caress of the rudder is certainly appropriate. The boat may not be at all responsive, but the real joy is always in the giving.

My concern, however, is hugging kids: That is the heart of the matter. We hug our kids because they are important to us. In fact, the most important role many of us play is the role that our college educations probably did not refer to at all: the role of parent. Whatever benefits there are to a college education, it is entirely possible that parenting will confound more graduates than Ulysses, accounting, quantitative analysis, or the Middle East. At Dartmouth, the fact that some day I would be somebody's father never occurred to me with any gravity. While we were educated for the Great Issues of the day, more than one friend and contemporary has been brought to his knees by the problems of parenting, from assembling the doll house on Christmas Eve to the first garage-door splinters found on the side of the station wagon. And by those more serious problems: alienation power struggles, drugs, sexuality, and fear.

All the lectures, books, texts, and classes on parenting however, still make me wonder if the essence of parenting is not found in hugging a child with reasonable frequency. Proof of caring, of reassurance, of proximity may be on certain occasions what any child needs.

Sitting in church one recent Sunday, I was watching a group of third-grade students, having started the Sunday-school program be presented with their special Bibles. One boy got frightened during the ceremony, up in front of the church before all those grown-ups. He started to sob and headed back up one of the side aisles, looking in vain for his bearings. Very quietly, 80-year-old Henry Hokanson reached out one of his arms and embraced the boy and gathered him into the pew beside him. Henry did not know the boy; it was a simple parent-like gesture, even though there was nearly three-quarters of a century in age difference between them. The boy sat, reassured by Henry, and in a few moments was quiet. His parents had noticed his departure and shortly came to recover him. By then he was calmed and saved. Henry Hokanson had hugged a kid that day.

In Hanover on another recent occasion, I was standing outside the football-team dressing room at the back of Davis Varsity House after the Cornell game. Final score: Cornell 21, Dartmouth 7. Several families lingered there: some jubilant Ithacans and the rest of us waiting for Dartmouth players.

The offense had not been particularly strong that day; the team had been unable to maintain any long continuous drives, and had rather sputtered most of the afternoon. My son could take no credit nor assume responsibility: He performed well in the pregame warmups and, I thought, rather nicely graced the bench. However, one of the other pairs of parents belonged to the Dartmouth quarterback, whose running and passing were the key to Dartmouth's fortunes.

The quarterback came out before my son, looking sore, stiff and discouraged. To be sore, stiff, and discouraged was, of course, appropriate. The normal reaction would be to tell him to cheer up: There would be another game next week. Or to respond by offering the condolence that he was only one of a full team of 40 players. But the father did not do that. He simply looked his son in the eye, somewhat sadly but clearly sympathetically, and then put his arm lightly around the son's head, drawing it briefly to his shoulder. The boy bowed for a minute, and took one deep breath. Then the father turned to the rest of the family and quietly suggested that they all go to dinner together. That invitation recognized the pain but yet resilience in that family.

The quarterback was hugged that day. I sense he felt better because of it. There are times when words are a limiting feature of our ability to communicate with each other. We can see that silent communication in Rembrandt's sketch of "The Return of the Prodigal Son." The tearful prodigal kneeling before his father. The father, old, bearded, bending over and gently placing a hand around the shoulders of the son. The son who once broke his heart, and now has returned. The father of the prodigal was a parent who could, unconditionally, love his son, under circumstances that try any parent. Can we always love?

Norman Carpenter's essay "Fill the Bowl Up?" appeared in thiscolumn in May of 1976.