Hand in hand, we go through life
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- June 12, 2021
- 921
By the time I’d made it to the ninth grade, I had held hands with a girl exactly once, and I wasn’t even sure it counted.
I’ll let you be the judge.
The winter before, she and I had met up at our little town’s skating rink — in reality an intentionally flooded and iced-over baseball field — and it was, as usual, packed with kids, most of whom were engaged in juvenile hijinks.
In all honesty, though, had I not been with her, I would probably have joined their ranks and done stupid (but fun) stuff like playing crack the whip or snatching the stocking caps off the heads of unsuspecting skaters.
I may have been new to the social whirl, but even I knew enough not to subject a young lady to that kind of boisterous boy-dom.
So after she and I had made our way carefully down the wooden steps to the ice surface, which was buzzing with adolescent electricity, I reached out my gloved hand to her mittened one.
It was one of those moments that has remained frozen in time.
I had been walking her home from school that fall, and occasionally, we would stop at the public library, ostensibly to get an early jump on our homework but mostly to play footsie under the table or allow our fingertips to brush together as we paged through the card catalog, looking up Egyptian exports or the Dred Scott decision.
So we weren’t exactly strangers in the night, and when she placed her palm into mine, it felt so right, so natural, so, well, fitting.
Off we glided, our hands joined, creating a snow-globe memory that always makes me smile for its innocence and significance.
It doesn’t snow much here on the Crystal Coast of North Carolina; in fact, it hardly ever occurs, and when it does, it’s bound to bollix things up for a couple of days because folks just aren’t used to it.
You’d think, you really would, somewhere along the line, someone would have realized the Atlantic is filled with salt water and that it’s an almost infinite natural resource. Why they don’t boil a billion gallons of it and use that salt to de-ice highways is one of life’s mysteries. Instead, they use sand, which, when combined with melting snow, produces oozing puddles of mud.
It’s just one of the stupid (but fun) things I love about the South.
Speaking of the beach, it’s a splendid place to observe the hand-holding habits of America’s youth, a subject I immerse myself in every summer. You can learn a lot about young people simply by watching them. The only problem is it would be wildly inappropriate to insert myself into their teenage day dreams.
It must be intoxicating for a guy to find himself walking side by side with a girl as the waves roll in and the sun beats down and the pelicans and gulls glide gracefully, riding the gentle sea breeze.
In my mind they’ve only just met, he from some Northern place, she a Dixie belle, and they’ve been nearly inseparable ever since. As they walk together, I can almost hear the gears grinding in his head as he thinks to himself, “Should I hold her hand or not?”
It’s at this point I want to bolt from my paisley patterned beach chair, leaving my well-stocked cooler and CD deck playing Wilco’s “Summerteeth” behind and rush to his side.
“Hey, listen man,” I want to say to him, “if you do what you’re thinking about doing, it’s going to doom what you’ve got going.”
When hand-holding doesn’t come naturally, it can be as lethal as a grenade rolled into the midst of a sand volleyball game or a jam-packed clam bake. The price exacted for pushing your luck can be punitive indeed. You have to be smart and pick your spot with care.
My wife and I differ on my interpretation of this scene as it plays out right in front of us, summer after summer, and I get that.
To her, it’s a largely harmless expression of sun-splashed affection.
To me, it’s a stupid (but fun) risk to take.
This difference of opinion doubtless has its roots in our past lives.
She’s a product of the public school system, where kids brazenly kissed in the hallways as they lingered by their lockers. I’m spawned from the parochial Petri dish of Catholicism, which not only frowned on giving in to the temptations of the flesh, but the nuns also would have gone outhouse-rat crazy if we’d dared to hold hands. That kind of intimacy was a signpost on hell’s highway.
When I went off to Notre Dame, I knew so little about so much that I’m almost ashamed to admit my cluelessness. As I entered the sainted realm of one of the country’s most revered Catholic universities, I began losing my religion, so to speak, because the message being imparted seemed to be saying, “Open your mind.”
So the more I learned, the more I questioned everything.
“That’s what college is for,” Mom said. “It’s not a job factory.”
But when that first summer home arrived, I needed to find gainful employment, and so, with a little help from my professor parents, I accepted a position on the grounds keeping and maintenance staff.
It was honest, hard work, and I looked forward to clocking in most mornings, especially when there was a cheerleading camp on campus. Those pretty girls in their tight T-shirts and cut-off shorts made even the most demanding tasks seem to fly by very quickly.
One June afternoon as I push-mowed the lawns that bordered the performing arts center, I left my mower and jogged inside, looking for a water fountain and a small slice of air-conditioned comfort.
Then I did a stupid (but fun) thing.
I peeked inside the theater, where some sort of play rehearsal was going on. Spotting an attractive actress, I went in and sat in the last row to watch. She was one of those gifted performers, the kind the spotlight always finds, and I was determined to meet her.
We spent a lot of time together as June became July. She — it turned out — had just graduated from the same high school I had the year before as she and her family had relocated some time back.
“Maybe that’s why I didn’t recognize you,” I said, immediately regretting my awkwardness, a trend that had become a pattern.
She let it slide. “So tell me all about Notre Dame,” she said. “Learning anything?”
I liked her from the start, and when I asked her to accompany me to the town’s annual Fourth of July fireworks show, she said, “Sure.”
And that’s how I found myself that Watergate summer, sitting next to a pretty girl in the top row of the stands surrounding the college’s baseball diamond, a field I had just helped mow.
And as the sky exploded into brilliant colors, her hand found mine.