It used to be that when you heard the words, “Guess what,” you’d know right away someone was pregnant. Just those two words could send you gushing with emotion, jumping up and down, and hugging for joy.
This morning, a friend greeted me with two other words, also heavy with connotation. “Bad news,” she said. And even though it came from out of the blue, and there’s been little other than “bad news” all over the world these days, I knew immediately: it was cancer. Her husband had been diagnosed with cancer. And all we could do was listen to each other’s wailings, and try to hold one another up. And hug.
We hug in happiness and we hug in sorrow. It takes only two words to understand which kind of hugging you’ll be doing. And after a long while of hanging onto people because you’re miserable and need comfort, it sure would feel good to embrace them in joy. So I looked high and low for something uplifting to report on this week. North, south, east or west there was nothing but trouble. Hurricane Irma’s devastation, storm surge, threats of intercontinental ballistic missiles, Mexico’s strongest earthquake in 85 years, hackers making huge data breaches, more cancer, friends’ fathers’ failing health…. My blog, the weekly hug I send my readers, seemed doomed to be another depressing pity party.
It’s embarrassing and difficult to be searching for joyfulness with this much suffering going on all over. So I’m opting out of joy this week. I’m taking time off to howl hysterically in my own private hissy fit. But I’ll leave you with this photo-shopped scene of my best friend. Here, Suki’s hoping she’ll catch up with the woodchuck that lives under our patio. Intent on nabbing the chuck, she doesn’t always hear the two words that make her smile for the camera, “Cookie, Suki.” This is the closest I can come to sending you a happy hug at the moment.
How was your week? How are your relatives that live in Texas and Florida and all the places that got hit by hurricanes? What was the most memorable hug you ever had?