Hold My Hand

 

At church yesterday morning I noticed an elderly couple holding hands and it made me smile. For whatever reason, the longer people are married, the less likely you are to see them publicly holding hands. That’s not an indictment on the health of their relationship, it’s just an observation this is often true. Honey and I have always tried to buck that trend. Holding hands is such a simple, silent gesture, but it speaks volumes. It says I love you, I’m here for you, I’m glad I’m with you, I’ll walk with you. To borrow a line from Jimmy Buffett, “Words never spoken, but so much was said.”

I’ve tried my best to remember the first time I held a girls hand, but for the life of me I can’t remember. If I had to guess, it was almost certainly on a Friday night in middle school at the Pulaski Skate Center during a “couple skate”. The DJ was probably playing something like Bon Jovi’s “I’ll Be There For You” and all the boys and girls who mustered up the courage to couple up would hold hands and skate around the rink for a few minutes until the song ended and they retreated to their cliques — the girls by the snack bar and the boys by the video games.

Honey loves to tell the story of when she moved here before the start of our Senior year, she had to make friends with my ex-girlfriends if she wanted any friends because I “had dated every girl in the school.” What she fails to understand is that this is only true if you take into account that I participated in the pre-teen ritual from 5th-8th grade of “going out” with your couples skate partner for a few weeks, only to break up and find someone new to go out with the following Friday night when the DJ played Poison’s “Every Rose Has It’s Thorn.” 

I may not be able to remember the first time I held hands with a girl, but I remember the last girl I held hands with. Honey and I met on a hot, mid-August afternoon, a couple of days before we began our Senior year of high school. I’ve told that story many times before, so I will skip over those details and focus on the night of our first date. A group of at least ten of us had piled into a couple of cars and were traversing through Giles County while I played tour guide to all of the cool, interesting, and beautiful spots that most folks don’t take the time to see. One of those spots I’m literally looking at this very moment. I’m looking at it because I can see it everyday from my front porch. 

I directed our entourage down Chicken Creek Road to an easy to miss dead end dirt road. At the top of the hill sat Rocky Point Cemetery, and if you hiked behind it to a clearing in the woods, you could find an old, unmarked, and largely unknown, Antebellum cemetery. For awhile we sat around telling ghost stories and pretending to have seances in an attempt to scare one another, until we grew bored and decided to move on. In the cemetery, Honey and I sat beside one another, our knees touching and my heart racing. Slowly our hands slid closer and closer until finally our pinkies touched and my courage spiked enough to take her hand. There’s not a roller coaster on earth that can replicate the feeling that shot through my stomach and chest in that moment. We didn’t really talk that much; we mostly just sat in silence riding the wave of emotions produced my a million chemical reactions firing through our bodies. When it was time to go, I finally started talking as we walked down the hill towards our cars. I was telling her all about this place and the meteor shower we were going to watch, and then we stopped in a clearing on the Western face of the hill, an eternity of stars in plan view before us, and I fell silent. I’ll always regret that I couldn’t find the courage to kiss her in that moment, though everything inside me was screaming “KISS HER!!!” I didn’t, but I did stand there facing her, holding both of her hands while in the heavens above us stars were falling to the ground and we were falling in love beneath them. I may not have been brave enough to kiss, perhaps because holding her hand was enough, more than enough, too much. I just needed to be present in that moment and feel what I was feeling, namely, that I never wanted to let go of her hand. I’ve held that hand for over thirty years now. 

After a church event yesterday afternoon I held hands with another girl. I’ve been holding hands with her for quite awhile too, pretty much her whole life. At only 17 months, our little Nola has already got us all pegged. She goes to mama when she’s ready to sleep, mamaw when she wants to scribble with pen and paper, grandaddy when she’s ready to check the cows, Honey when she needs M&M’s and Gumbo when she wants to walk. Many a day, the second I walk through the door she goes for her shoes and begins shouting “Walk! Mumbo, walk!” She wants me to take her outside and walk around the yard, driveway, sidewalk, parking lot, wherever we may be. If I am able, I always oblige, as I did yesterday in the fellowship hall at the church dinner. We head toward the door and she reaches up with her little hand and grabs mine. Together we walked up the hill and across the parking lot, no particular destination in mind, just walking together. There is nothing better than the feeling of that little girl wanting to hold my hand. We stopped for a moment at the top of the hill and I couldn’t help but see flashes of my life passing before my mind’s eye — how the love that I felt holding Honey’s hand three decades before was powerful enough to travel through space and time and contribute to the creation of this perfect little beauty at the end of my arm.

Roughly a year and a half ago I first felt the spark of this love when she, only a few days old, slept in the cradle of my arm in the early morning hours and wrapped her tiny little hand around my finger and my entire heart around hers. The magnolias have started to bloom around here, and that is true literally and metaphorically. She’s gotten so big already, and the seed of independence that is within us all has started to blossom in her mind. Who knows how much longer she will want to hold my hand and walk with me. The bigger she gets the less she will need my hand to steady her steps, and in time, the less she will want it at all. Only God knows if I’ll still be around to hold her hand 30 years from now, regardless, I never want her to let go when she reaches for mine. Somewhere from the distant past of a dark skating rink in 1990 I hear the faint echo of the DJ queuing up the opening lines from the ballad “I’ll Never Let You Go” by the hair metal band Steelheart:

Angel eyes

You have angel eyes

Such a smile that lights up my life, oh-oh

You're a dream come true

Now I'm holding you

And I'll never, never let you go

I will never let you go

First time I laid my eyes upon you

All my dreams were answered

My love to you I surrender