Holding My Hand

Michael meant more to me than springtime in Paris. 1

We met when we were seven, on the rock wall between our two backyards; sometime back far enough to have actually believed the other had cooties. We got along fine for neighbors - innocence and a need for companionship soldering a bond between us. At least, it was that way until we were nine, and as a sly imitation of his older brother Danny, Mike tried to hold my hand, and I brained him with a rock. He ran inside howling, "Carrie hit me again!" and I sat against our oak tree with a smug expression of satisfaction from what you'd have thought to be an attempt at murder listening to the racket next door. 2

I got a licking for that, but Mike needed six stitches and four weeks to speak to me again. Needless to say he never tried to hold my hand again - at least not for a very long time.3

Mike was the classic boy next door. He was always at the family bar-be-ques, always over for Christmas parties and pig roasts. He helped my father build a tree house in the oak when I was thirteen, and our families sat next to each other in church. We knew each other like we knew no one else. 4

To fall in love with Michael would have been every bit as perfect as any next-door romance and every bit as insane as Capulets and Montagues...yet the summer I turned fifteen I felt a small, indecipherable lump grow in my throat and a weak tremor in my voice whenever I saw him, a flash of a grin and sun-bleached blond hair. Confused and in denial, I swallowed it down and ignored it.5

The summer we turned sixteen Mike and I were in the tree house as we would often spend our days, sitting cross-legged on the edge of the platform, talking for hours. It was 1970 and the draft had started, calling Danny, as well as countless other older brothers, away to Vietnam...an odd word that meant a funny blue shape on a map halfway across the world, yet holding such a strange significance for those that cried and prayed for loved ones. 6

Michael and I were talking until late that night, and to reassure my fears that, he, too, would not be drafted, Mike made a pact to run to Canada if anything ever happened. 7

"That’s ridiculous, I’ll be fine. I might as well plan on taking you with me if I run." 8

That now-familiar lump rose in the throat and I swallowed and meekly said, "well, we'll hope not." I remember the smoke from bonfires that night, the worn wood of the tree house beneath my bare feet, and the traces of Mike's fingerprints, idly and unknowingly touching my thigh. The rain came down that night, heavy, washing away our fears of everything save the good and true deeds we would one day venture out and accomplish; the worlds we were yet to save. 9

Yet the day came in 1972 that Mike came to the tree house, called my name, and delivered the news. He had been drafted for Vietnam. I pulled away, fighting back tears of sorrow and anguish, while igniting an anger for Mike's broken promise. I could not let him see me cry. "You swore!" I accused, and Mike crawled up to the tree house with me and collected me in his arms while a rainstorm beat down on the aluminum roof. We huddled there; suddenly feeling more vulnerable and desperate than we had ever felt before. Mike cleared his throat. "I'm sorry I'm leaving." 10

"You should be."11

"Carrie, quit it. Don’t be angry with me, you know I wouldn't have chosen this." 12

"What happened to Canada? We were going to run away together if we had to."13

Mike chuckled. The rain pounded on the roof, cascading down in curtain waterfalls in front of us; separating us from the world. "So you'll miss me, eh?" Mike whispered and pulling away, smoothed my hair from my face. All at once, in starry brilliance, Mike reached for my hand, leaned close and kissed me for the first time. My breath caught in my lungs; it was like falling from the sky, like running downhill, like breathing underwater...too tragically beautiful. Mike held my hands in his, and looked in my eyes. "You'll never be away from me, Car. I promised you that...that's the important part. Vietnamese jungles can’t keep us apart. We will always be together." 14

I kept these words, and others - his letters, close to me when they lowered Mike into the ground. I was eighteen and yet, so much older, at once. Even now, recollections of official documents, of American flags, of dog tags tangled in my fingers, cause me to bite my lip and concentrate on not crying in the supermarket. 15

Mike greets me behind summer's birch trees. He comes to me in autumn's harvest moons, in the lilies poking through snow after four hard months. 16

Mike was my springtime in Paris...and though my life follows its course, leading me away from stone walls and tree houses...Mike will always be there, holding my hand...