Hugging is a habit in the Apple Capital

The Column: 10.07.24

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I am finally going to get my COVID booster shot, which I postponed while I was on the road doing shows after each of which I wound up in the theater lobby commingling with the crowd, shaking hands, patting shoulders, posing for pictures, 80-year-old ladies snuggling up to me, being breathed upon, which is the proper thing to do. When people’ve spent their Saturday nights tuned to your radio show, you don’t sit locked up in a dressing room.

This is an aspect of broadcasting I never imagined when I entered the field fifty-some years ago, the affection. It wasn’t my intention to make friends; I enjoyed radio because it made me feel important, more important than I had felt as a dishwasher or a parking lot attendant. Working in the parking lot during morning rush hour, I yelled at people a lot and now, years later, they don’t come up and press the flesh.

I grew up evangelical and we weren’t huggers by nature. I see young men hugging these days and am sort of amazed. My grandson hugs me. I don’t believe I ever hugged my father or grandfather or uncles. I’m pretty sure I didn’t. But here I am in Wenatchee, Washington, the Apple Capital of the World, on the Columbia River in the Cascades, being clutched to people’s bosoms. Apparently they consider me a friend. I reciprocate but don’t understand it. And this is a fairly reddish section of the state, which means that I am probably getting hugged by some Trumpers who, were it not for radio, might rather deport me. This is fascinating stuff.

The show assiduously avoids politics. The crowd sings “America the Beautiful,” including the verse about the alabaster cities gleaming and maybe “Home on the Range,” with the verse about looking up at the stars, but listening to it you’d never get a hint that I am a radical left-wing Communist Marxist intent on destroying all that is good and true. I am only out to amuse.

I grew up with the Gospels. In the American religion of football, everything is a moral allegory, one team wanted it more, our team blew it, choked, fell apart, while the other team refused to give up, and so a coach must be fired, a player demoted, human sacrifices made. I don’t see life as allegorical, except as a joke. I don’t see this mosh pit in the lobby as a reward for hard work. I see it as God being wildly, crazily generous.

The day before Wenatchee, I had breakfast with my cousin Stan, who is 93, and his wife, Gloria — Stan who has seen more tragedy than I’ll ever know and who radiates cheerfulness. Stan’s dad abandoned the family when Stan was a kid — ran off with a schoolteacher and Stan searched for him for years and finally found him and forgave him. I could not have done that. It simply isn’t in me.

My dad bowed his head over every meal, even if it was simply Raisin Bran with sliced bananas, and thanked God for it and for His love and mercy in our lives. If we ate in a café, he maybe whispered the blessing so as not to attract attention, but we still felt grateful. And now in a theater lobby, mingling with strangers, I am dazzled by life’s generosity. It isn’t an allegory, it’s just a gift, like the apple I ate before the show, a Wenatchee apple, a fabulous apple, though I’m no judge of apples. It was awfully good.

I’m grateful for my wife and daughter, two loving and funny people in my life. I’m grateful that my ambition to do good work has stayed steady, even grown, with the years, and each show is a hill to climb, the novel waits for me to address it and each day is graded A or B or F depending on the progress I’ve made. Work is one of the great gifts of life, and the beauty of the literary life is that the work is there when you wake in the morning, you don’t have to put on a suit and tie, you just make coffee and open the laptop.

What a fine country we have. I put my arm around you, friend. I believe the noise will diminish and we will return to enjoying our liberty, including the freedom to be very grateful.

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