“I have always been a hugger. Many moons ago, one of my tag lines, when I was saying goodbye to friends, was, “Give me a hug, it’s good for you! I saw it on Donahue!” I am dating myself, btw lol.
Fast forward to 2009, when I met Carol Miller on a Mediterranean cruise. What a magical adventure! It turns out she had organized an entire day just for hugging and had people hugging strangers worldwide! “World Hug Day!” Why didn’t I think of that? It was right up my alley, so it didn’t take much convincing to get me hooked. For several years I hugged in Key West, where I was living, and called the folks I roped into doing it with me “The Southernmost Huggers.” One of my
most memorable hugging stories comes from this place.
Fast forward to 2009, when I met Carol Miller on a Mediterranean cruise. What a magical adventure! It turns out she had organized an entire day just for hugging and had people hugging strangers worldwide! “World Hug Day!” Why didn’t I think of that? It was right up my alley, so it didn’t take much convincing to get me hooked. For several years I hugged in Key West, where I was living, and called the folks I roped into doing it with me “The Southernmost Huggers.” One of my most memorable hugging stories comes from this place.
We were hugging down by the Southernmost Point. It is a landmark and a rite of passage to take your picture there when you visit Key West, in other words, a PERFECT spot for some friendly folks with “FREE HUGS” signs to stand as people are already lining up with their cameras out. There was a woman in a traditional Muslim hijab and robe who hugged me and kept hugging me. She smiled and smiled and hugged me so tightly; it was almost weird, but not quite. Her name was Mena, and she was from Morocco but lived in Paris. It was hard to get too far with our conversation, with her zero English and my limited French, but she wrote down her address and invited me to her house in Paris for Couscous. Now Paris is one of my favorite cities, and I visit as often as possible. On my next trip to the City of Light, about a year later, I had my friend Lisa, a tour guide, act as my translator, and Lisa and I met Mena and her son Samir at a restaurant in Paris after sundown since it was Ramadan. They were the most hospitable and friendly folks you could ever meet, they bought us dinner, and Sammy insisted on driving Lisa and me back to our respective apartments. Sammy and his girlfriend also visited me again in Key West, and I eventually had homemade Couscous at their home on another trip to Paris.
New friends, maybe lifelong friends, from far-flung corners of the globe, and it all started with a hug…
Of course, I could go on and on with hug stories, especially since Carol and I took her hugging show on the road with an international hugging trip to Croatia, but I will save those for another day.
I no longer live in Key West, I am now in my soul city of New Orleans, and my team is called the “Crescent City Huggers” since the “Big Easy Huggers” sounded, well, I don’t know…Come on down and get your hug on!
Science has proven that hugging another releases ALL the feel-good chemicals in our brains, and if you don’t believe me, hug someone and see if you don’t feel happier!
Thanks, Carol, for introducing me to a new world of hugging. I can’t imagine life without it or you!”
