Free Hugs?

August was a particularly full month for me: my aunt Virginia passed away and I flew to Washington State to attend her funeral mass; I completed my first 6-day silent meditation retreat in San Rafael; and I compiled and sang in the interment service for the mother of my sweetie Jan. Now that I'm between editing issues of the synagogue newsletter, have nearly completed my preparations for the High Holy Days, and have mostly put together my workshop on state government issues for tomorrow night, I have a touch of bandwidth for a blog entry or two.

What I wanted to write about was something I experienced last weekend. Jan and I went shopping Sunday morning. We were saturated with the weeklong coverage of the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and were deliberately avoiding watching any more about it.

On our way into Fry's electronics superstore, we encountered a woman with a handmade sign that offered "FREE HUGS." Jan and I looked at each other and decided to accept her offer. As we entered the store, however, my inner cynic started wondering why she was doing that. Our best guess then was that she was participating in a psych experiment to determine if there were any commonalities among people who accepted or rejected her offer. I sure hoped that she wasn't trying to spread some contagious disease or plant listening or homing devices.

It wasn't until the next day that I got it. I was walking by a florist shop in downtown San Francisco that had spread flowers on the sidewalk and had a sign that offered free roses in observance of 9/11. Of course! Sunday was September 11th itself. The woman was distributing hugs as her way of sharing comfort on the anniversary of that major national trauma.