First Hug
This was not the first, but maybe the forty-fifth time my dad and I hugged. (Yes, I can actually count them.)
The first time I hugged my dad, I was 27. Maybe older. It happened on the curb at LAX. I was flying back to New York, where I’d lived three years after relocating for a dream job. I was addled; it was an early Sunday morning. Without all my faculties, I just put my arms around my father’s familiar Buddha-esque body. I’d never done that before, but I figured, if you can’t hug your own father before a cross-country flight when you’re hungover and almost 30, when can you?
To my surprised delight, he reciprocated, patting my back, sort of slowly, but not awkward. “Bye..bye…,” he repeated, synchronizing the last pats with each “bye.” Twelve seconds later, we pulled apart. As I pulled myself through the terminal, I tried to remember that ever happening before. I couldn’t.
My father’s love was measured in scientific calculators, like the more expensive model he insisted I have when I was whatever age it is that people of my age were required to have one for learning. My dad was a divorced aerospace engineer who could solve all problems but our family’s by himself, in his head, without aid of any instrument. But he never shamed my indifference to math or the way things regularly failed to add up with my mother; he gave to all of us selflessly, and still does.
Dad’s love is omnipresent in the margins. We’re Chinese. We don’t bear hug, tickle or tackle out affection. His devotion was behind the sidelines of football games I cheered, where the silhouette of his belly became a source of others’ laughter, jock jokes. My idiotic adolescent psyche blamed the wrong party; I once asked my dad if he could wait in the car next time. He was rightfully annoyed, but he did – for maybe one or two plays. Slowly, he stood closer and closer to the action, watching in the shadows.
His patience was endless. When I became old enough to work but couldn’t drive, he picked me up after school, got me to my job, returned to his own and came to get me when we both were done. Sometimes, he’d fall asleep in the reception area, waiting. We didn’t even go home to the same place — he would drop me at my mom’s and I’d see him the next morning when he took my brother and me to school. It was a lot of work, and curbs between us. Maybe that’s why it was so easy for me to embrace him outside the airport. He’d waited for, left and retrieved me at so many, and now I was the one seemingly always leaving him standing at one.
As my dad’s gotten older, he’s left more of the driving to me when I’m home. I enjoy our commuting time together, though I recognize the role reversal. I text when I’m on my way, off the freeway, outside. I watch for him to emerge backward from the front door, key in hand, his Buddha belly more and more visible until he pivots my way and waves, walking to the curb where I wait with radio tuned to the classical station we now both prefer. This is the andante to our symphony as father and daughter.
Fifteen years since our first hug, I still live more than 3,000 miles away. My dad stopped driving this year, and the on-demand car services that have become autopilot for my generation and younger remain awkward and uncomfortable to him — the last time I ordered a Lyft to pick me up at his place he tried repeatedly to pay the driver himself with cash. Our hugs happen closer to his home, but other than this reflection, I don’t give them a second thought. We have more comfort and practice with this parental display of affection. Often, he even initiates. And I hope we never stop.
