Page 8 - Holding Hands

Holding Hands
ble School assignment. Memorization is hard work; and when you’re ten, with the energy of a scared rabbit, it’s even harder.
What, with all of the other things that were going on during those summer vacation days, it was quite an accomplishment for me to memorize those two verses—and remember them all the way until the next-day’s class! But I did, and I still re- member them to this day.
One particular morning that same summer, my mother made an announcement at the breakfast table that we had a new next-door neighbour. She explained that the elderly lady that had lived there decided to move into a nursing home, and that a young man had bought the house and moved in the previous weekend. I knew that the house had been for sale because there had been a “For Sale” sign on the front lawn.
My mother went on to say that she had no- ticed that our new neighbour took walks every morning, and that she had bumped into him that very morning when she went out to retrieve the newspaper from our front lawn.
In a brief chat, my mother learned that his name was Winston; that he was engaged to be married; and that he worked as an “engineer or something” at a manufacturing plant in the next town over.
It wasn’t until years later that I realized that he didn’t drive a train, and that an electrical engi- neer worked behind a desk! That was the first time that I had heard of Winston.
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