holding hands for the first time

Ella and I met at a bowling alley after a church event. We hit it off very well. We saw each other the second time at a youth devo in Clear Lake City Church of Christ.

I was waiting for the bus (I had forgotten this but she told me today). She said her friends said, there he is. They were all watching for me. She got off and we went inside. I met her little sister, Joyce, but I was interested in Ella. We talked nervously a bit then went into the auditorium and sat together.

It was a huge auditorium as Clear Lake Church of Christ was a huge church. John Allen Chalk was speaking that evening. He was big on the youth circuit in the Churches of Christ. I heard little of what he said.

A momentous event was going on right where I sat. It was the decision on whether or not to hold her hand. Would she let me? We sat and feigned interest in the talk, moving our hands closer and closer until one of us – joined. We were holding hands.

It is hard for older people to remember the earth-shattering event of holding a girl’s hand. You sit quietly for a few minutes in case it was an accident and she jerks her hand away when she realizes you were holding it.

Then after a few minutes, you settle your hands a little more and a little more until you are holding hands.

We left that night as, if nothing else, hand holding friends. I wanted to be more.

We met again in a couple of weeks at her church, the Sun Valley Church of Christ in South Houston. There was a concert of a choral group from the college where I attended 15 years later. Nothing of importance there, just interesting.

There was a youth thing afterwards, everybody sitting around doing kid stuff with the college students, most of whom were not much older.

We didn’t get along that well that night. It seemed a bit flat, and I began to wonder if I had made a mistake. Not sure what it was but it was just not there for us.

The more I thought about it later, the more I was determined to give it one more try.

I got my job with Southwestern Bell Telephone as a coin collector, taking money out of pay phones. So that meant I had to move to Houston.

I found an apartment from some people named Mixon. It was an efficiency on the back of their house. That meant, of course, that I slept on a fold out couch and that it was impossible to hide the clutter that a 19 year old bachelor who was a slob at heart would leave around.

There was a stove, but no oven. Instead there was a small toaster oven that I could use to do moderate stuff – which of course was all I ate. I ate a lot of packaged chicken fried meat substance and grilled cheese sandwiches. The dishes sat in the sink sometimes for a week at a time, collecting rust and little flies. It was horrible.

But I liked it. I had a 1962 Mercury Meteor with a small dent in the driver’s rear end. But it was my car, my apartment and my job. I drove from Texas City to Houston Wednesday and Thursday. Friday was Good Friday, which the telephone company and everybody else that was decent in 1960’s America had off. I moved my few possessions to the apartment, threw them somewhere and then was through. Like any self-respecting young man, it took two trips and ten minutes to unpack.

Saturday I went out to lunch at a cafeteria, again the 1960’s idea of special eating. I wore a sports jacket, plaid pants and a turtleneck. Mr Cool. I walked around the mall it was in for a while, came back to my new home and went to bed.

Sunday was Easter Sunday. I showed up in my best outfit: a white shirt with a gray and red striped tie, black pants and a black and white houndstooth blazer.

I was there two hours early.

She showed up a little less than an hour before church. Her parents opened up the building and all. She was wearing a blue and white delft pattern dress that fit her great, along with gray Mary Janes. She looked great. She saw me and smiled and that was that.

I married her  a little less than two years later.

Her friends were astonished. Not only had she been the quiet one who practically never dated, she was the first to get a guy’s senior ring. She was the first to go steady. She was the first to get engaged and to be married.

I thank my God that I went ahead and showed up that Sunday morning. It was his doing and his prompting, I believe with all my heart.

I have loved her since I met her and will until I die.