A friend of mine had an experience so special recently he wouldn't just tell me about it; we had to act it out. We stood up and he took my left hand in his right, and we stood as if walking together; I was playing him. Then with his left hand he patted the top of my right hand.
That was it. It brought tears to his eyes, he said - and to mine, as he told me about it. His handwalking partner was a girl of four, the daughter of some friends of his and his partner's who were visiting, and he and she had been walking up Ninth Avenue to a restaurant talking up a storm. She's his first four-year-old, it seemed. And the hand-pat was his first experience of the care of a child. He's just turned seventy.
I was filled with joy that he's had this experience (one I've been lucky to have since going to Japan after college, where a 4-year-old took me under wing, and renewed every time I see my nephews) and a kind of disbelief that he's had to live without it. He's a warm, sociable man, a priest, part of a large extended family. He's married and baptised scores of people, including many relatives. And yet he had to wait this long for someone to trust him with a child.
