Hold My Hand

In March 1996 Cathleen and I flew down to West Palm Beach, visited my grandmother (Kahn), and then spent a few days in the Keys. Of the four or five nights we spent in the Keys, we dined twice at a little restaurant called Mangrove Mamas. It was the lone structure on Sugarloaf Key to have survived The Hurricane of 1919, or something like that. Half of the building lacked a roof, and the other half looked like it was a shanty that had been assembled with pieces of scrap earlier that afternoon. The seafood was out of this world, their Key Lime Pie had been voted "Best in the Keys" by the Miami Herald for several years running, and the place had a magical ambience that I can still feel when I think about it. The first night that we ate there we were directed to the bar while we waited for a table to open up. We drank beers out of mason jars while listening to two guys play guitar, and whenever I hear Hootie and the Blowfish's "Hold My Hand," I am immediately transported back to that place. If the sum of one's life boils down to a collection of moments, for whatever reason -- youth, the first vacation with the woman I loved, the beer -- that was one of my moments.

I had another moment today. On the heels of a productive weekend at home (built shelves in the livingroom for our TV components; assembled shelving unit for storage room and organized a portion of the mountain of crap in there; grilled a whole fish Saturday night), the four of us were pretty spent by the end of the day. Helen (with Grace) came over for a playdate with Eliza, and Max was finding himself the object of nobody's attention and none too happy about it. So I dragged him out to run an errand with me. We drove to the local CVS for soap, shampoo, sunscreen and some other odds and ends. As we walked around the store, I was holding his hand, a not unusual arrangement when we are out. This time, however, as we walked through the aisles of the store, I felt Max blithely stroking the inside of my palm with his thumb. Comforting himself, connecting with me, or just enjoying the texture of my hand...I'll never know. But when we approached the cashier to pay for our items, it took a great deal of willpower for me to let go.