Certainly much of who we are, who we become, is set in place early in
our infancy. In fact, there's pretty good evidence that some
conditioning is going on while we are still in the womb. But also,
some of it is cultural. My mother was the eldest of six children.
Every single one of them were reserved. Just like my grandpa Ludwig,
their father. Grandma Ludwig was a warm woman when she was alone with
us children, but she was mostly quiet when grandpa was in the room.
Grandma Ludwig was timid and had low self esteem. She once told me
that she used to sing when she was alone. When mother was born, she
said she began singing to her. "But when Elsie laughed at me, I never
sang again." Sort of sad. My dad's family were far more
demonstrative than mother's family. Dad's elder sister and their
mother would go nose to nose, shouting at top volume. But they still
were not huggy people. No, "I love you" from any of them. Dad told
me, "I love you, Carl" just before he died in 2001, for the first time
in my 66 years. By that time I knew it without his needing to tell
me, but I sure wish he'd told me when I was a boy, and could have used
it.
Carl Jarvis
On 12/16/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Well, my younger daughter, the one who was in an orphanage in Vietnam during
the war, whom we adopted when she was 28 months old, doesn't like to be
touched. The kind of spontaneous hugging and kissing, "hello", or,
"Goodbye", that we naturally do when we see each other in our family after
some time has passed, makes her uncomfortable. So we allow her to initiate
such contacts. It doesn't have anything to do with sex. It has to do with
whatever happened to her emotionally when her mother left her, at 13 months
of age, in the orphanage.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Roger Loran
Bailey (Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
Sent: Saturday, December 16, 2017 2:42 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx; Carl Jarvis <carjar82@xxxxxxxxx>
Cc: jamesjarvis98 <jamesjarvis98@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Power of a Caring Touch
I've never been much of a hugger, but I was once a bit of a touchy person.
That is, when I was talking to someone I tended to put my hand on their arm
or their hand, sometimes a shoulder or back if we happened to be standing
near each other. I was always conscious of it, but it just came natural.
Since I became blind, though, I have trained myself to refrain from that. It
was a conscious effort too. The reason was that once I became blind I could
never tell just where I was putting my hand and I became afraid of
embarrassing myself. But even before I started training myself not to do
that I did notice that some people seemed to be a bit uncomfortable with it.
Notably, the ones who seemed to be uncomfortable with it were always male.
On 12/16/2017 10:58 AM, Carl Jarvis wrote:
To Bob and All Huggy touchy Folk, everywhere!
After not seeing my former boss, Shirley Smith, for several years,
Cathy and I drove to Sedona, Arizona to spend the day with her. When
we arrived Shirley gave Cathy a huge hug and then embraced me.
Stepping back she exclaimed, "My goodness, you've finally learned how
to hug!"
During my time as an assistant director with the Department of
Services for the Blind, I was the only male on the four person
executive team. Shirley, Bonnie and Faye were all old friends from
years of working together. Our executive team meetings always began
with group hugs and friendly, personal chatter. Having been raised by
parents who seldom touched in public, never hugged by my mother, and
most certainly never by my father, and only kissed lightly on the
forehead when being tucked into bed, I was called, "The Stick" by my
Team Mates at work. I asked Cathy, whom I hugged every chance I got,
and she said, "Yeah, you are a bit stiff when you hug other women." I
told her that I was going to correct this flaw in my otherwise
flawless persona. She rolled her Italian eyes and said, "Either you
got it, or you don't. I'm not sure there's any hope for you." I
began daily drills. I hugged her in the morning, even before we rose
from bed...enough of that! But still, when the Team met I fell back
into being Stiff Old Carl. I wisely decided to avoid practicing with
my female staff or the young female students, but my daughters and
close female friends became subjects to my crude hugs. So it was a
proud moment when Shirley finally declared me to be a bona fide
hugger.
Folks like Shirley, and most of all, Cathy, were important in my
efforts to learn that hugging was not always an effort for a guy to
"get next" to a woman. And then I began hugging my son and my adult
grandsons, and my sons-in-law,.
Something else that we did not learn to do when I was growing up was
to say, "I love you". Cathy and I agreed that this was going to be a
much used word, not only between ourselves, but with our children.
And so love ruled our home. But I would never in a thousand years
tell another man that I loved him. Children, yes, but once they
reached manhood, never!
Then this young macho bull rider galloped into daughter Jennifer's
life. And with him, Don brought a gaggle of fellow Bull Riders.
These young guys amazed me. They joked easily together, slapped one
another on the shoulder, hugged when it came time to leave, and said,
"I sure love you, buddy".
The contrast between those stiff, more formal years and the warm
hugging world I now live and love in, is amazing. Whatever we do,
let's agree that this current Witch Hunt will not undermine our desire
to hug one another and tell our dear friends and family, "I sure love
you". I understand that it is Sex that advances our Race, but it is
truly Love, that gives Life meaning.
Carl Jarvis
On 12/15/17, Bob Hachey <bhachey@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi all,
I sure do hope we can truly reduce the occurrences of sexual
harassment in the workplace and in society generally. But I also hope
we don't go too far.
(see below).
Bob Hachey
The power of touch, good and bad . By Roland Merullo . I come from a
family of touchers. Grandparents, parents, a multitude of aunts,
uncles, cousins - we hugged and kissed without reservation. Often,
when we spoke, we'd put a hand on the listener's shoulder or forearm.
There was nothing strained or affected about this: It was as natural
as making eye contact, as shaking hands, as reaching out and
straightening the crooked shirt collar of someone we loved. This
comfort with physicality occasionally got some of us into trouble. A
cousin of mine went to see a new priest at the local church, needing
to speak with him about a difficult matter. After an hour-long
face-to-face, my cousin thanked the priest, reaching out to squeeze
his upper arm as he did so. "Don't touch me! the priest shouted,
recoiling. My cousin left the church wondering if he'd ever step back
inside. In an unpleasant encounter with a local police officer, after
a traffic incident, I happened to reach toward him - not in a
threatening way, but as a gesture of reconciliation. I wanted to
touch him on the shoulder and refine the point I was trying to make,
offer an avenue to agreement. He responded, loudly, fiercely, just as
the priest had done. "Don't you touch me! In Russia, where I've spent
a lot of time, it's common to see two male friends walking along the
sidewalk arm-in-arm. The same is true in Italy. It doesn't mean
they're lovers; it's not sexual, simply human. But in certain
American circles, touch between straight men is all but forbidden, as
if the Puritans are still casting their long shadow over us. One of
the things I enjoyed about having young children was the almost
continuous physical contact. You lifted them up when they were tired.
You sat them on your lap when reading to them. You touched them a
hundred times a day, and each of those touches
-
like those between my cousins and parents and aunts and uncles and me
- was a wordless "I love you," an assertion of a bond of trust. The
touch of adult lovers is the epitome of this wordless acceptance. We
all remember our first kiss, our first hand-holding, even our first
slow dance. It is touch, ultimately, that keeps the species going.
And so it's particularly distressing to me, as someone who takes joy
in physical contact, to witness all the recent revelations of what
must be called a perversion of that contact. If allowing a friend or
loved one to touch you speaks to a wordless trust, then putting your
hand on someone who doesn't want to be touched speaks to a poisonous
rupture of that trust. It's a violation, perhaps the prototypical
violation. As much as it troubled me to hear my cousin's tale of his
bad moment with the priest, and as unpleasant as it was to have the
police officer feel threatened by what was obviously a slow and
unthreatening gesture, I believe people have the right to decide when
and how they want to be touched, or if they don't want to be touched
at all. I was discussing this with a young woman recently, a bright
22-year-old, no stranger to unwanted attention. We were wondering if
the flood of recent revelations would actually lead to better
behavior - at least on the part of some men. "It might change
things," she said guardedly. "I just hope it doesn't mean that nobody
touches anybody anymore. In almost every case I can think of, the
intent behind physical contact is unambiguous. You know when it feels
wrong, and when it doesn't. Grown men know when they're giving a
co-worker a friendly embrace - in moments of congratulation or deep
sympathy, say - and when they're angling for some illicit sexual
thrill, or asserting a weird dominance. Even children can often sense
when someone is creepy or not. Like my young friend, I hope the
revelations by women who've been assaulted give the creeps pause and
lead to an atmosphere of greater respect. And, like her, I hope we
also find a way to continue to be able to touch each other, when it
feels right - for both parties. Roland Merullo's latest novel is "The
Delight of Being Ordinary: A Road Trip with the Pope and Dalai Lama.