Never Too Late, or Thank You Leita

"Don't tell me you call that a hug!" she says, mirth and tease in her eyes. It's 1998, I've only been in Halifax for a couple of months, and I've just witnessed my first Canadian snow. In fact, it's about 2 a.m. but here we are, standing on the landing midway down the staircase in the rickety, brown, typically Haligonian residence house (that smells like goat-piss, like any old house, said Tal, and with reason), celebrating the snow, and hugging. I knocked on her door and woke her up, in honour of the snow -- I know she doesn't mind, she lives for the little moments, like me. Leita has already seen one winter here, previous to this one, but as a Haitian she still appreciates the novelty of it. We are not unused to the small hours; Leita, Sophie (our inseparable French third) and me did lots of things in the dead of night, procrastinating and genuinely enjoying each other's company. Once, on the wings of an exhilarated night mood, we played "drums" in the kitchen, using all available pots, pans, and utensils and created a most blissful racket (Christine, whose room was right next to the kitchen, wasn't impressed though).

So, "Don't tell me you call that a hug!" Leita teases. "What's wrong with my hug?" I make a couple of small steps back so I can see what she means. "Well, you need to use your entire body when you hug, not just the shoulders and the neck. This is what you do, look." She inclines the upper part of her torso slightly forward, firmly leaving her middle and the legs planted vertically and away from the imagined person she's hugging. It looks distant, antiseptic, superficial and, above all, ridiculous. Do I really look like that? She stays motionless for a little while to give me a chance to study this unlikely posture. When she thinks it has sunk in, she goes back to her normal self (the lovely, graceful, bodily type of self), and I'm still thinking (she has a point, now that I come to think of it). "When you really hug somebody, you cling to them with your upper, middle, and bottom parts; you hang on to them, you encircle each other for a moment in time, so you can feel each other. Now, that's a hug!"She demonstrates, and as she's folding me gently but firmly into herself covering as much surface as possible, something shifts almost imperceptibly, clicking into place, like a dislocated bone which finds its groove again; as in a puff of magic, the world has moved slightly and fallen into place. On the staircase of this old, funny-smelling house, I'm learning again how to hug, and I think of my mother and how she held me close in a broad hug, sitting on the edge of my bed early in the morning when she used to wake me up for school.

Perhaps hugging is like riding a bicycle: you never really forget how to do it. Perhaps this tiny moment was more important than any of the postgraduate ramble I learned that year. And certainly, you learn more from some people than from others.