Hand-in-Hand

A similar version of this post was originally published under the title, Memories of hand-in-hand images, in October 1988 in the Virginia Beach Sun.


There is this elderly couple that I would occasionally observe walking through the lobby of a building where I delivered mail. I remember them stepping out of the elevator, arms locked together, and taking short, shuffling steps to where I would be distributing the mail. Neither of them walked with the greatest of ease, and one could easily and humorously speculate as to who was helping whom.

There are not many details to my recollection of this couple other than that short shuffle that I would sometimes observe. But I thought about them the other night a while back at—of all places—a skating rink where kids, mostly teenagers, were whizzing around just as smooth and as graceful as most people only dream about.

I was there with my two girls, Jessica, seven, and Danielle, five, trying to teach them the basics—short steps, lean forward, pay attention and especially in Danny’s case, don’t get silly. When she gets silly, she loses it completely.

Anyway, we had skated just a few numbers when a buzzer went off and they asked everyone to clear the floor because it was time for the men only skate. My girls sat down and rested while I skated. After a short time, the buzzer blew again signaling to clear the floor. Now it was time for the ladies.

I was just a little surprised when my girls told me they wanted to go around. Whenever the three of us skated they would clinch my hands with their little fingers, straining to maintain and too afraid to relax their vice-like grips for even a moment but now, surprisingly, they had decided to go it alone—or should I say together, since I was the one alone.

The music began and I waited for a little opening before helping them onto the floor and giving them both a little push to get them started. And then they were on their own.

They were holding hands—tightly, their elbows cocked tensely in a show of determination and probably a little fear. They were taking the smallest of baby steps, for without me to pull them around, they barely got one foot to go slightly forward before the other would slip back.

By the time the first song of the two-song set was finished, my two girls, hugging close to the outer rim of the rink, had completed only about half a lap. Everyone else had probably done close to a dozen or so. And the worse was yet to come, for as the second song began, I could see that they were slowing down.

But their hands stayed clinched, and their elbows firm, and their little feet kept pushing along. Although they wouldn’t even complete a single lap with their tiny, three-inch strides, they would be beaming understandably at the end, as happy and proud as if they had just appeared on ABC’s Wide World of Sports.

And as I watched them advance, I suddenly thought of the elderly couple on my mail route. The similarity was striking. The old man and woman’s infirmity was the young girls’ challenge and the young girls’ spunk was the elderly couple’s perseverance. And at the bottom of it all was the love and dedication of four people—two quite young and two quite old—to helping their partner along. Take away the age difference and the skates and the two scenes were identical.

On the morning following the skating party, I learned that the old man had died. The vision of the two of them walking hand-in-hand, pushing forward determinedly came to mind only to be quickly replaced by the image from the night before of my two girls.

Both images, the one of the young girls, so new to the joys of companionship and the other of the elderly couple, for so long each other’s strength and support, had now also become companions and would occasionally but for all time, continue to drop by, hand-in-hand, every now and then.