Kissing Well : Close Encounter With Flu Is to Be Avoided

As the flu season gets under way in earnest, it is time to take up a serious issue: turning the other cheek.

This is the most common gesture at close encounters of the party kind. The cheek, quickly offered up in all its plump pleasure, is an effort to reserve the lips for better things.

You see mutually consenting adults kissing and being kissed on the lips, cheeks, ear, hair, air. You see people hurriedly putting out a hand to avoid kisses, putting their hand on another’s shoulder in a strong-arm effort to keep kisses at bay, knocking heads together in various degrees of avoidance or passion and even trying the Vulcan Death Grip.

Taking Flight

Then there are those who simply turn and run, saving themselves (as their mothers taught them) for better things, especially when threatened with a kiss from someone obviously suffering from hay fever, cold, flu (no matter if Hong Kong, Asian or home-grown) or some other plague of our time.

The practice of turning the other cheek, once limited to Southern politicians and snake-oil salesmen, has, over the years, come to threaten the more formal handshake.

Whether politicians extended the practice from kissing babies or substituted it for handshakes after too much pressing of the flesh at rallies is hard to say.

Casual kissing in the old days (i.e., before you were born) was a matter of simple logic and immutable rules.

Social kissing--as opposed to the serious kind expected to lead to Other Things--was practiced according to a list.

Kissing Cousins

Consanguinity Kissers, otherwise known as kissing cousins, were decreed by one’s grandmother assisted by maiden aunts and taught members of the family upon birth. Kisses were expected from grandparents, parents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles--great or otherwise--first cousins, second cousins and cousins once-removed, in-laws and all wealthy cousins no matter how far out the branch on the family tree.

You kissed a CK upon greeting on roofed occasions, or in the front yard if they were from out of town, and all comers at family reunions, funerals, christenings and graveyard cleaning-ups. This was expected even if, in the absence of the arbiter, you couldn’t quite remember who was who or why you should be rubbing up against them.

Such kisses were full-fledged, lips-on--and you couldn’t even hit anybody for kissing lips instead of cheeks. Such tribal customs were practiced, of course, with a great degree of difference in enthusiasm. Children of all ages up to threatenable practiced kicking, squirming escape maneuvers of all varieties.

Hugging Also

Kisses were only the half of it. Hugging was often two-thirds to three-fourths. The degree went from one-arm distant to two-arm close encounter, including touching as far as was mutually agreeable or singularly inescapable.

The question that now arises is: How far is it going to go? In Washington, social kissing is now practiced by those people who call you by your first name without asking permission or waiting for the introduction to be completed, which include all who wish to give the impression that they’re closer friends than they really are, agents of the worse kind, those who need your vote and all people to whom you’ve taken an instant dislike.

Any day now, beauticians, fashion salesladies, lawyers, accountants and perhaps panhandlers, plumbers and the man who comes to fix the roof will demand to press the flesh at your first appointment.

Is there no end to this? No defense? No measure to be taken? No laws to be passed?

An Answer Exists

Indeed, there is an answer. We offer an ancient and antique imported maneuver: hand-kissing, known in Vienna, Austria, by the euphonious phrase kuss die hand. In fact, in Vienna, a land of fine phrases as a substitute for questionable actions, saying kuss die hand is often a merciful substitute for the actual gesture.

Hand-kissing in Washington has long been an underground gesture practiced by Austrians, Germans and members of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire.

And kissing the hand--at least among members of nobility, pretenders to various thrones and those who wish to be thought one or the other--affords permutations at least as extensive as kissing farther up.

Properly practiced in the Leslie Howard-Anthony Andrews mode, the gentleman (or slave or supplicant) bows over the hand of the lady (mistress, priest, personage) and makes a kiss about an inch away from the hand, not actually touching lip to hand at all.

Bolder Approach

Bolder types with more in mind have been known to grab a defenseless palm, turn it over and kiss the palm.

Anyway, perhaps what we need is a general agreement, a platform, a standard, to be brought in under the sponsorship of the new Administration and passed by Congress to become the law of the land.

Provisions would include: no kisses of any kind exchanged by people who have never before met or who have not mutually agreed to call each other by their first names.

All people coughing, sneezing, wheezing or expecting to do any of those things would be required to issue fair warning immediately--say by shouting, “Don’t kiss me if you don’t want to catch my cold!”

All un-American exchanges of recognition--hand-kissing, bowing, prayer hands, etc.--would be practiced only by trained and educated practitioners.

Or what about agreeing to keep hands off?