I Hugged the Hertz Attendant

I’ve known her in each church I’ve served, though she’s worn different faces and had different names. She always approaches with a friendly smile and open arms.

“I’m a hugger!”

When you get to know your parishioners in a new church, you will meet one or more “huggers.” I walk into these hugs willingly and return them. They are a sincere gesture of welcome, encouragement, and affection.

Studies show that hugs are good for us. Appropriate human touch can reduce stress and anxiety and strengthen our sense of connection.

But I am not a hugger.

After years working as an employment lawyer and mediator handling harassment cases, then trained in the church to avoid inappropriate hugging, I am quite reserved.

In the church, we mainly do the side hug, the one-armed embrace. As pastor, I wait for the other person’s cue: a handshake may be better, or even a smile and a little wave. It’s complicated because people vary greatly on their preferences for physical touching. When I practiced law in my former career, hugs were few and far between with clients or officemates. Once you hug someone you can’t really take it back.

And yet.

Last month, under the bright New Mexico sun, I asked the Hertz attendant, “May I give you a hug?”

“Sure!”

And there it happened, a regular hug as nice as the huggers give at church.

I stood back, surprised at myself. Later I tried to figure out why I had done such a thing.

I still have no idea.

Perhaps if I share my simple story you can help me out.

We flew to Albuquerque, excited to be on vacation in one of our favorite places in the world. After renting a car, we drove up to Santa Fe and gave ourselves over to the things we love there: hiking, looking at art, feasting on good food.

The windshield got dusty in the dry heat, which is to be expected. You just press a button, squirt out the window cleaner, and the wipers take it off.

But a couple days into the trip, the wipers just moved the dust around. There was no more fluid in the well.

Please don’t laugh, but as partners often do, we disagreed about how to solve this little problem. I thought we should go to the Hertz facility at the airport (a 20 minute drive away). Chuck said that we could just go to the store and buy some wiper fluid. I insisted that they needed to know they had messed up.

I made calls to Hertz but got stuck in the “Press 1, press 2, press 3” cycle with no humans to be found. An AI voice answered once, but he/she/it could not understand what I was talking about.

Finally I went local and reached the desk at the small Santa Fe airport. I explained what had happened: rented a car in Albuquerque, but they didn’t have the wiper fluid reservoir full.

“Sure,” she said, “come on over, and we will get that all fixed up.”

Again Chuck threw out the option of buying the fluid and putting it into the car. I would not hear of it.

We got on Cerrillos Road and made our way to the airport. We parked in the rental car lot outside of the terminal. I went in to find the nice lady I had talked with on the phone. She greeted me with a hello and a nice smile. She grabbed a gallon of wiper fluid from the little room behind her.

As we walked out to the car, I thanked her. She said something like, of course, it’s what we do. You could see her quiet pride in the operation there, where there is more one-on-one with the customers than in the big airports.

Soon the hood popped open. The reservoir eagerly drank the whole gallon.

She lowered the hood and rubbed her hands together. “All set!” she announced. “Have a great vacation!”

And just like that, I asked, “can I give you a hug?”

“Sure!”

And that’s what I did.

Not a side hug.

A real hug.

It was completely out of character, and yet it was joyful, a time of emotional lightness, a gift of sheer grace.

We thanked her again, and she returned inside the airport to help someone else. I wish I had gotten her name. I hope she liked the hug. In my imagination later it felt good to be so sincerely thanked. Maybe she told her family that night that a nice lady from Florida hugged her. Surely it doesn’t happen every day.

Why did I hug the Hertz attendant?

There is no theory that adequately explains it.

True, she solved our problem. She was kind and had great customer service skills. She was a ray of sunshine, an exception in a world that traps you in endless phone loops.

And we were on vacation in our happy place.

But I am not a hugger. I did something I would never do. I did it spontaneously without thinking, but I’m not sorry at all.

Afterward, we took a side trip to the nearby La Cieneguilla Petroglyph Site. It has over 4,000 Puebloan images etched into the cliffs in the 13th and 14th centuries. You have to scramble up rocks on the side of the cliffs to see them, though, so I stayed at the bottom while Chuck climbed up to get some pictures.

That was OK because it gave me some time to sit with my wonder about the nice woman and the hug. I saw the beauty around me and took some photos too.

Petroglyph Art from a Long-Ago Culture

I wonder if the people who carved these drawings worried about hugging too much or in the wrong way. I suspect they had their own cultural norms that we cannot imagine.

I will never know why I did what I did in that parking lot at the Santa Fe Airport.

But I have been thinking about the huggers at church and how they might see the world.

Maybe they have a sense of goodness all around us like what we experienced that day. Maybe they look at others and see kindness, worth, and lovableness.

Maybe grace is like that. It arrives disguised as something ordinary — a phone call answered, a favor freely given, a gallon jug of windshield fluid poured into a dusty rental car. And sometimes, before our minds have time to explain it, our hearts respond.

Originally published at https://alexandrahedrick.substack.com.