hold it

Today as I was flying on my bike past a bus stop in the Tower I caught sight of an elderly woman sitting next to a young girl on the bench. The older woman was (seemingly) using a cell phone that belonged to the girl.

There was something about the way the woman was holding the phone that made it look (to me) as though she were unaccustomed to using a cell phone. The way her elbow poked out, and the stiffness of her arm, and the way she held her face just slightly away from the phone....

I may be all wrong, of course. The woman might be a ninja with her cell phone, able to text-message with her eyes closed, use her voice name key without repeatedly shouting into the air like a maniac, and have even have mastered the mystery of 'the switch-over.'

But it got me thinking.

Once I fell for a guy just because I could tell by the way he held a book in his hand that many a book had been cradled there.

And I thought about the word itself: hold. My dictionary gives it 26 definitions. For such a little word. Among other things hold can be a prison cell, a delay, control, an obstruction, and a place where stuff is stored inside a ship.

I could see William Wallace (well, okay--it was Mel Gibson--but still) standing before his troops bellowing out his command to "Hold...hold..."

But back to my original thought, and what is actually the first definition given: "to have in one's grasp."

I wondered about the way I hold onto things. How I have them in my grasp. And that thinking led me down the path that is the most frightening of them all: self-examination. Eeeesh.

So yeah. Sometimes holding is good: as in with babies, hands, dinner reservations, and apparently Scottish patriots at one point.

But if it is true that you can tell a lot about someone by the way they hold on to something, perhaps having a very tight hold where there should be release is worth reconsidering.