Good Morning,
It is 5:30PM and I am heading home from a day at the office. The sun is coming in through the passenger window of the work van and splaying across my hands on the steering wheel. My mind is somewhere else as I perfunctorily navigate this road I have become so familiar with. As I glance down at my hands, my memory is transported to another time and in my minds eye instead of my own, I see my father’s hands. Hands calloused and scared from razor sharp steel, flying bits of molten metal and years of righteous work as a sheet metal worker.
I do not have all of the scars and certainly not the calluses my father had, but I have enough to realize that they look very similar to his in his later years at 61, when he reluctantly gave up the work to fight for ten years the cancer invading his body.
I suppose that it was during that ten-year period that I became the closest to my father and it was during his 60s where our hands now look so similar. With skin thinned and softened with age and where the veins become pronounced like roots of a tree across the ground. Hands that have built, fixed, provided and shown love to the ones around us. Every mark, every crooked finger and every blemish brought on from trauma and age, have a story.
Recalling the ones my dad had is difficult as so many times, I was not always there during those years. I was after all, in my own life with family and work. However, I do recall many of my own starting from my adolescents.
- The first memorable one was when I was about 10. Leon Johnson and I were digging a “Foxhole” with my Army Surplus shovel. Leon manning the shovel and it was my turn to pull the dirt out of the hole. We got out of sync with each other and my hand was where the shovel came down. And yes I did go home crying. You will find that scar at the base of my 3rd and 4th fingers on the back of my right hand.
- Another one on my right hand was from a dog names “Gus Gus” at the Soost farm in Washougal, Washington. We would go up to the Northwest on vacation in the summer to see relatives and visiting the farm was pretty special for a “city” kid. Anyway, when playing with “Gus Gus” and a ball it got a little rough and my right thumb ended up in his mouth instead of the ball. The quick extraction left a gash about an inch and a half long. Huge for a kid. “Gus Gus” was a good farm dog and the wound unintentional. 50 years later the scar is still a reminder of that day so long ago.
- Early teens while helping my father with welding the Bar-B-Que at the Floyd Avenue house. I was moving the Gas Powered Welder back to the shop. In a moment that should only be reserved for “seniors”, for leverage, I wrapped my hand around the stainless steel muffler, which was still blue from the exhaust of the welder. It only took an instant to realize what I had done, but not quick enough to avoid 3rd degree burns on the palm of my hand. During the healing, the wound became infected and required a drainage tube. The scar from that is at the base of my index finger on my left hand.
- While playing with gas powered model airplanes with high school buddy Mike Duncan, I managed to get nicked by a propeller on my left thumb.
- Of course working on cars both in my teens and with sons in later years has contributed to quite a few of the nicks and scratches leaving their mark. It doesn’t seem to be a proper job unless a little blood is shed for each project.
- Setting up the house here in Arizona, I was winding an old clock when something broke and the winding key turned into something akin to a Whirling Dervish and before it was finished had removed a pretty nice chunk down to the bone from the thumb knuckle of my left hand. The clock hung for a couple of years before I had it repaired. I’m pretty sure it didn’t care.
- Probably the most traumatic thing my hands have had to experience, aside from the number of times I have managed to miss with a hammer and take out a thumbnail, was when I was delivering a repaired National Cash Register back to the J. C. Penny store in Merced, CA. The register destined for the basement required that I use the freight elevator to transport it. Now freight elevators are pretty simple to operate, unless your mind is somewhere else. That day, it apparently was, because when I pulled down on the leather strap to lower the upper wooden gate, I forgot about the one that always comes up from the bottom at the same time. Much to my chagrin and surprise, when the gates met in the middle, my hand was caught in the latch. Reaching over with my left hand and unlatching the gates, it became apparent that a finger was never intended to point up that way, unless of course you are a Thai dancer. I guess it could have been worse, as I could have lost that finger, but instead I only crushed the bone on my right index in 10 pieces. Six weeks later, I still have a finger albeit numb and a bit crooked.
I suppose what I am getting at here is that there is a story in all the mishaps we may experience, whether they leave scars on our body that we can see or ones privately held inside. They live right there along side of the good ones and it then becomes our choice, which ones we hang onto.
My hands are looking a lot like my fathers these days and I am proud of that. They help to tell a story of my life, just as my fathers did his.
Love, Dad