Blog 2295 – 02.02.2022

“I Mustache You For A Hug”

Today’s date 2/2/22 is one of those eye catching numbers. My beloved dearly departed daughter Emily Elaine White, made her exit stage right shortly after her thirty-second birthday almost ten years ago. A few months before being diagnosed with the liver cancer that took her, she said to me: “Dad, you just must hang around till at least your eighty-third birthday because it will be such a significant number – 11/22/33.”

Well, my Sweet Em, I am trying my best to hang around and honor your request. As a daddy who from the first time I heard her heart beat inside her mother’s baby bump lived in anticipation of the first time I would be able to hold my precious little lamb, I can tell you that what I have missed most these ten long years without Emily is her wonderful hug.

My Emily had a wonderful voice that she used to entertain, enlighten, and encourage as I attempt to with my ramblings in this daily blog:

http://www.theencouragingword.co

True performed by Dancing with Spock – Original song – LIVE at MelonHead + Friends

True performed by Dancing with Spock – Original song – LIVE at MelonHead + Friends

Winter is for many, especially those in the colder, icier, and snowier places like Wisconsin a lonely time due to the weather often limiting travel and connections to family and friends. COVID-19’s social distancing and self-quarantines have further exacerbated these disconnects.

I wrote a little book about my Emily containing thirty-two episodes or chapters where I try to share how very much an encouragement she was to me and so many others. She perhaps more than any other person in my life besides my lovely and loving wife Linda knew how much a hug has alway meant to me.

There is a line in one of my favorite movies, Hearts In Altantis, where a strange man boarding in his mother’s upstairs apartment with a gift of clairvoyance tells an impressionable young boy that at a carnival he is planning to attend with a neighbor girl and her mom that he will atop the Ferris-wheel experience his first kiss, “A kiss by which all others will be judged.” As most people, I remember well love’s first kiss, but even more each and every loving hug that I have ever experienced throughout a lifetime.

I have often remarked about the narrow and restrictive fundamentalist Christian cult that I grew up in. Despite all the beliefs that I was taught most of which I have let go because they no longer serve me I still recall many songs that still touch my heart, but even more their custom of greeting one another not with a “holy kiss” as the Apostle Paul instructed, nor a holy handshake as western custom dictates, but with a holy hug.

I found the refrigerator magnet pictured above at a gift shop in Vinton, Louisiana stopping with my wife and our mother on our way back from South Carolina just after the holidays. It reminds me of a commercial seeking donations to cover the cost of a newly renovated library in Platteville, Wisconsin. I saw the commercial many times during a long cold and snowy winter off work and mostly on my own in nearby Mineral Point, Wisconsin where I spent the winter in a inexpensive motel. MP was too small to have its own movie theater and nearby Platteville was the nearest town with a multi-screen movie theater, The Millennium. I spent many a wintery afternoon there watching newly released movies and seeing the library commercial in which a lot of little children held mustaches on sticks to their lips and a voice-over announcer said, “I mustache you a question.” Like those little ones, and my dear departed Em, I am not the least bit shy about saying “I mustache you for a hug.”

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David White

https://drive.google.com/file/d/12u-VjGg82HE-cnCBLV6sk3TExkMmiEq0/view?usp=drivesdk

Seven