Wibbly-wobbly

My last post didn’t show up on my Facebook newsfeed; I’m kind of hoping this one doesn’t, either. 

Every Tuesday and Thursday I’ve a class on Thoreau with possibly the biggest contemporary hippie in Santa Barbara (at least)—he’s a wonderful man and marvelous professor and I think he is most likely the kindest and most compassionate man I’ve ever meet and maybe will ever meet.  And for some reason last Thursday he mentioned that in one of his other classes he participated in his first class-wide group hug ever and wasn’t it a shame that was the first and that it hadn’t happened again and who knew how long it would take before it did happen again—

And my first thought was, 'Before it happens again?  I doubt anyone in this class would mind doing a group hug for Teddy.  We all adore him enough.'

And my second thought dawned with an awful kind of sinking feeling: 'I don’t want to hug anyone.'

But they’d already voted on it and I think I was the only one to not raise my hand—we trudged (well, I trudged) outside beyond the concrete patio and huddled together in a big group.

Then everyone lifted their arms and I was the last one out of the building so they made room for me and the guy who’d held the door for me and we squeezed in at different spots of the circle and I was suddenly surrounded by warm bodies.  Warm, breathing, kind bodies.  People.  On my left was a girl I knew solely because she submits beautiful poetry to the magazine I work for and on my right was a young guy who I’m not sure I’ve ever really even looked at before, let alone spoken to.  But my arm fit around the girl’s waist kind of perfectly and I fit slotted into the guy’s side with his arm over my shoulders kind of equally perfectly.

We stood out there with our arms around our classmates and our professor for what felt like a long time, but was probably only a minute or two, and for the most part we kept silent.  I wanted to say, "I’m glad I’m in this class.  Even if I haven’t been keeping up with the reading, it helps.  With everything."

But I didn’t.  I couldn’t make the words take on air and noise.

And then after a long moment we all went back inside and continued on with our discussion on Walden.