I live just a mile or so outside of center St. Michaels. In summer months, driving through St. Michaels I see tourists everywhere. They appear like ants at a picnic.
They cover the sidewalks. Families spill over onto the streets like flowing lava, intimidating drivers and grinding traffic to a halt. They ignore the pedestrian crosswalks and dart out from between parked cars putting themselves in jeopardy and giving drivers a heart attack. Parking becomes a nightmare and judging by the vehicles filling all the parking areas, it seems as if our out of town guests cannot get by without driving SUV’s as large as dump trucks. I have regarded tourists as a subspecies of the vulture. They descended in droves landing where the sale items outside shops stand ripe for the picking. Tourists overrun the landscape, forage for a day or so and then return to their nests far away, leaving behind them the effluence of their presence; water bottles, paper cups and plates, plastic bags, promotional flyers and newspapers floating in the wind. On Mondays, the parking spots at the Acme, occupied only the day before by herds of SUV’s, were now liberated and available again to residents.
Since I’m a resident of St. Michaels, I groused to my wife, Jo,, one day about our weekly invasion of aliens. She remarked, “It’s sweet to see people holding hands.”
I’d never noticed. Wherever I looked, I now saw people holding hands. My eyes were opened, and I began viewing our little town differently. I’d assumed that only young lovers held hands in public. Not so here. Couples well up in years, their silvery heads glistening in the midday sun, like mad dogs and Englishmen, shopping bags in tow, were walking hand in hand. They enjoyed being in St. Michaels and being with each other. I saw spouses, children, and parents, and a gay couple all holding hands. I discovered the magic St. Michaels manifest in its happy visitors.
Regarding tourists, I’m now a kinder and gentler man. On weekends, now, I look for these tender expressions of affection and on a quick drive through downtown one day I counted no less than fifteen couples handholding.
If St. Michaels can encourage such affectionate demonstrations in today’s harsh world, I say “so what” if I must park a half a mile from the Acme to get milk or wait a few minutes for a family to cross the street in undesignated areas.
Sad to say, touching each other has earned a sinister connotation these days. We need touch to survive just as we need touch to nurture mutual affection. Monkeys know this and after a fight hold hands as a sign of reconciliation. Holding hands immediately comforts children and in hospitals, as soon as the nurse touches her patient, blood pressure drops, and the patient feels safe.
Science has been studying the act of handholding. Tiffany Field, director of the Touch Research Institute at the University of Miami, observes, ” Based on what we’ve seen, when we get more physical intimacy, we get better relationships.” Stephanie Rosenbloom, writing for the New York Times has investigated hand holding among college students and says: “ . . . There seemed to be two universal truths: that hand holding is the least nauseating public display of affection and has become more significant than other seemingly deeper expressions of love and romance.” One student allowed, “It’s a lot more intimate to hold hands nowadays than to kiss.”
Holding hands requires certain skills. In the case of my wife and me it means, literally, managing the long and short of it. Jo has longer legs than I have and stands a hair taller. I have a long torso but short legs. As they hang at our sides, our hands do not meet naturally. To further complicate the matter, she prefers holding hands with her knuckles facing forward. So do I. To make the handholding a mutually satisfying experience requires a trade-off. I will take Jo’s hand the way I prefer, and shortly after defer to her preferences. It helps to regulate our differences by conscious choices. Long legs make for greater strides, and it may take me a couple of steps to catch up with her. I try to regulate the speed with which we cover distance by tugging on her hand as if it were a bridle. Most times it works, and we walk in synch.
Regulating differences is one of human kind’s greatest challenges. Our survival depends on it.
In this troubled world, St. Michaels deserves a show of hands for inspiring expressions of affection in its visitors. And yes, for also inspiring kindness in one of its grouchier but now more enlightened resid
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