Take My Hand

“Take my hand.”

How many times have we said that to our children, Duckie? Crossing the street, hiking down a slope, just wanting to feel their small warm hands in ours, and to let them feel our enveloping protection.

We say that to each other more often now, walking together on snow-slick sidewalks while visiting those same children, all grown up now, in their frankly too cold home towns. Or in the dark, when it’s hard to see the pocked path along the beach in our more sensibly warm California beach town. Often with no words, when we just want to feel each other’s warm touch, something I never tire of, touch as warm and reassuring, or stimulating, as the day we first held hands all those years ago.

There is a little less reckless speeding down LA freeways teasingly stripping as we head for home, but the excitement is the same, the anticipation as giddy.

You use your imagination now to create moving fictional worlds rather than documents for big mergers, but your intensity, your passion, your drive, is the same. It’s a big part of who you are, and why I love you.

We’ll be off on another trip to Europe this spring, to see and learn from the world, and to learn more about each other as we always seem to do on those trips. It’s fascinating and wonderful that after all these years we can still surprise and delight each other. Travel sets us free to be a little reckless too, like those LA freeways, that fast life, but on foot, walking across the Seine, watching the evening light on the water, looking for a shadowed portico where who knows what might happen.

On this your birthday, this beginning of another new year, I am so lucky to be able to say to you, “Take my hand.”