Our Human Hands

I've been noticing hands quite a lot the last couple of days.  Especially hands on men.  Their size, the prominent knuckles, their potential to do harm as fists, and their potential to do good, with tools, the friendly handshake, the gentle touch.  I generally notice people's hands, old, young, men, women.  Hands say a lot about people and often they are things that one cannot really put into words, leaving just an intuitive understanding and awareness.  Besides our massive and misused brains, our hands particularly mark us as humans.  It's those opposable thumbs.  So appeared in the archeological record the first crudely formed stone tool, a stone sharpened to cut flesh, separating it from the bones of an animal or to kill another human.  For thousands of years hands fed and killed and built shelter and made tools, then clothes, jewelry, homes, planted and harvested crops, made better weapons, mined and smelted metals, sewn fabric into clothing.  Hands making fists to strike and injure and hands shaking hands to make peace. Hands making music, plucking strings, covering holes and pressing keys, hands shaping pots and vessels from clay and using paint to create images of beauty and strength.

     I remember my grandfather's hands.  They were huge, with sausage fingers, hands that had worked the land because he was a farmer.  Mine are very different, rather delicate for a man.  My hands are small with long gently tapered fingers, the hands of an artist, a musician or a sybarite, but also hands that have cared for others, that have cleaned homes, and bathed and dressed people.  Hands that paint and strike computer keys and move pens in order to write, they are also hands that lift forks and spoons to my mouth, hands that cook, but not hands that steal and certainly not hands that hurt. 

     I must have been forty when the first age spot appeared.  Now, almost eighteen years later the backs of my hands are covered with freckles, or liver spots.  When I wake in the morning the fingers are often stiff and sometimes numb.  This I am told is a sign of age.  They are low maintenance.  being a man I am not interested in painting my nails, but if I did paint them then so what?  I will never feel the need to stop in at a nail spa.  I am intrigued by the genteel obsession that many but not all women have with their hands, especially their nails, ten little canvases to paint and decorate.

     I used to bite my nails.  Not a good habit but not so filthy and disgusting as some have suggested.  I don't anymore and now can barely conceive that I would ever have done such a thing.  I like to keep my hands as clean as possible and wash them frequently, though I take care not to become obsessed and germ-phobic.  My years of working in health care have made me very conscious of hygiene and the importance of not spreading germs.  Whenever I come home now, one of the first things I do is wash my hands.  I carry hand sanitizer with me everywhere.  When it is not possible to wash my hands I use it before I eat.  I also apply sanitizer in church before and after exchanging the peace, because during this warm and happy time of celebrating Christ's love together we are also passing germs to one another and later we will be receiving the host or the bread passed from our dirty little fingers into our mouths.  It all seems kind of neurotic, and still useless against the spread of viruses which can only be removed by actual hand washing with soap and water.

     We speak with our hands, not only the deaf but everyone when we speak.  Some wave their hands madly while talking as though they are in the middle of an exuberant interpretative dance.  Hands are sometimes, too often, used to deliver an obscene message, like the classic raised middle finger.  Caesar in the Coliseum could save or end a life depending on whether he raised or lowered his thumb.  When I was a teenager I hitch hiked everywhere.  My thumb asking assistance from every driver who passed me.

     I have never been huge on rings though I have worn them on occasion.  I have seen rings of exquisite beauty adorning some fingers, and leering miniature skulls on others.  If I ever wear a ring again I would like it to be malachite set in gold.  I love the malachite shade of green and the texture of the stone.

     Last year in Mexico City one evening in my hotel room I watched a TV program about a young woman with no arms.  While leaning back on my bed and dropping chocolate into my mouth a beautiful Mexican woman with long blonde hair (likely not a natural blonde, but who knows?) typed with her toes on her computer, and with her toes applied eyeliner and mascara quickly and expertly and chopped vegetables and cooked in her kitchen with her feet as though with the hands of an expert chef.  I thought of the Persian proverb: I wept because I had no shoes and then I saw a man with no feet. 

     I wept because I had no rings and then I saw a woman with no arms.