Conversations

In the mid 1970s I was going door-to-door in Hillsborough, California. At one house, an older woman opened the inside door and asked through the outside screen door what I wanted. The sun shone over my shoulder onto the screen door so that I couldn’t see past it.

I told her my purpose at which point she began to cry and said she was handicapped and her husband had just come home from the hospital. She couldn’t help him like he needed. I asked her if there was anything I could do. She opened the screen door slightly and a hand appeared. She asked me to hold her hand. After a few minutes, her hand slowly returned inside and she closed both doors.

I have had two thoughts since then. The first is that I was young and didn’t know better but today I would have gone to the community or neighbors or somewhere and got her some help.

And second, up to that point growing up consisted of a lot of hands holding mine. Home, school, church, everywhere. This small experience seemed to mark a transition to where I needed to be the one extending a hand.

I think the two thoughts belong together, and the second one may explain why the first has remained so vivid for fifty years.

At the time, you interpreted her problem practically: Is there anything I can do? Looking back, you can see practical things that perhaps could have been done—contacting neighbors, a church, community services, someone who could help care for her husband. That’s the judgment of an older man who knows more about how the world works.

But I’m not sure the young man failed her.

She didn’t ask you to find someone. She didn’t ask you to come inside or help her husband. She asked you to hold her hand. And you did. For those few minutes, apparently that was what she most needed from you. There is something striking about the fact that you never really saw her. The screen, the sunlight, and the partly opened door reduced the whole encounter to a hand reaching out and another hand accepting it. Almost everything that could identify the two people disappears from the story. What remains is the gesture.

That makes your second interpretation especially powerful.

Childhood really is largely a succession of extended hands. Someone holds our hand crossing a street. Someone teaches us to read, reassures us when we’re frightened, corrects us when we’re wrong, shows us how to do something, takes us to church or school, feeds us, protects us. We seldom recognize the pattern while it is happening because being helped seems like the natural order of childhood.

Then at some point the direction reverses.

And the interesting thing about your story is that nobody announced the transition. You didn’t wake up one morning thinking, I’m an adult now; it’s my turn to hold other people’s hands. A literal hand simply appeared through a partially opened screen door.

There’s also a subtle detail I like very much: she determined when the hand-holding was over. Her hand slowly withdrew, and she closed the doors. You didn’t solve her life. You didn’t even know whether you had helped very much. You simply supplied what she asked for, for as long as she wanted it.

That seems like a surprisingly good picture of much of what adulthood eventually asks of us. We often can’t fix what another person is facing. Sometimes our job is to find practical help, certainly. But sometimes the thing we can actually give is presence—“You’re not facing this particular minute entirely by yourself.”

And then eventually the hand withdraws.

I think that’s why your sentence—

“This small experience seemed to mark a transition to where I needed to be the one extending a hand.”

—is the heart of the entry. I wouldn’t explain it much more than you already have. The physical image carries the meaning almost by itself.

There’s one further thought your entry suggests to me. The transition isn’t really from receiving hands to giving hands. If we’re fortunate, we continue needing other people’s hands for the rest of our lives. The change is realizing that we have become capable of being the hand someone else needs.

For a young man standing on a doorstep in Hillsborough, that realization arrived in an unusually literal form.