Alden Nowlan - He Sits Down on the Floor of a School for the Retarded lyrics

I sit down on the floor of a school for the retarded, a writer of magazine articles accompanying a band that was met at the door by a child in a man's body who asked them, "Are you the surprise they promised us?" It's Ryan's Fancy, Dermot on guitar, Fergus on banjo, Denis on penny-whistle. In the eyes of this audience, they're everybody who has ever appeared on TV. I've been telling lies to a boy who cried because his favorite detective hadn't come with us; I said he had sent his love and, no, I didn't think he'd mind if I signed his name to a scrap of paper: when the boy took it, he said, "Nobody will ever get this away from me," in the voice, more hopeless than defiant, of one accustomed to finding that his hiding places have been discovered, used to having objects snatched out of his hands. Weeks from now I'll send him another autograph, this one genuine in the sense of having been signed by somebody on the same payroll as the star. Then I'll feel less ashamed. Now everyone is singing, "Old MacDonald had a farm," and I don't know what to do about the young woman (I call her a woman because she's twenty-five at least, but think of her as a little girl, she plays the part so well, having known no other), about the young woman who sits down beside me and, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, rests her head on my shoulder. It's nine o'clock in the morning, not an hour for music. And, at the best of times, I'm uncomfortable in situations where I'm ignorant of the accepted etiquette: it's one thing to jump a fence, quite another thing to blunder into one in the dark. I look around me for a teacher to whom to smile out my distress. They're all busy elsewhere, "Hold me," she whispers. "Hold me." I put my arm around her. "Hold me tighter." I do, and she snuggles closer. I half-expect someone in authority to grab her of me: I can imagine this being remembered for ever as the time the s**-crazed writer publicly fondled the poor retarded girl. "Hold me," she says again. What does it matter what anybody thinks? I put my arm around her, rest my chin in her hair, thinking of children, real children, and of how they say it, "Hold me," and of a patient in a geriatric ward I once heard crying out to his mother, dead for half a century, "I'm frightened! Hold me!" and of a boy-soldier screaming it on the beach at Dieppe, of Nelson in Hardy's arms, of Frieda gripping Lawrence's ankle until he sailed off in his Ship of d**h. It's what we all want, in the end, to be held, merely to be held, to be kissed (not necessarily with the lips, for every touching is a kind of kiss.) Yet, it's what we all want, in the end, not to be worshipped, not to be admired, not to be famous, not to be feared, not even to be loved, but simply to be held. She hugs me now, this retarded woman, and I hug her. We are brother and sister, father and daughter, mother and son, husband and wife. We are lovers. We are two human beings huddled together for a little while by the fire in the Ice Age, two thousand years ago.