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My father was a pattern maker in the Navy. He made engine parts from wood, so they could be cast into steel or iron. He worked on a ship that never left port, deep in the bowels perfecting his craft. The story goes like this: One day while working on something in the workshop on that ship, my father cut his hand. He was using the table saw to rip a four-by-eight sheet of plywood, of an unimportant thickness but most likely a half-inch. The wood had a knot hidden below the surface, unseen by my father. When the blade caught the knot, it lurched violently, pulling the massive lumber through.
This is common of wood with a knot, but this particular knot, on this particular piece of wood, caught my father off guard. As the blade wrenched the wood, my father’s hand, too lurched forward as he was applying great pressure to keep the lumber firm against the rip fence. The blade was fierce and sharp. It was unkind to the wood. It was unkind to my father. Before he could let go, the blade reminded him of its power, of its fury. When he pulled his left hand back, he was without the tip of his pointer finger, and without the tip of his thumb. Instinctively, my father wrapped his hand in his handkerchief to cover the wound, daring not to examine his digits – or what remained of them. He finished his work day this way. Hand wrapped in a handkerchief, soaked with blood, fingertips unknowingly sacrificed to the saw gods.
I knew this story well as a child. I heard it told. I told it. I scrutinized his fingers. I ran my tiny, perfectly round thumb against his. It was an exact forty-five-degree cut. When he made an “L” shape with his hand, you can see where the blade cut straight through, as if he intended it to. His hand, scarred and healed, dissected and imperfect, missing and present. Over the years this story has grown. I don’t know how much is true and how much is a myth. Stories grow over time, into fable, into legend.
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When my son was born, the midwife laid him on my wife’s chest. He didn’t cry, not at first, he simply looked at her with his giant brown eyes and gently flexed his tiny hands. They were seeking something – stretching and folding, straightening and bending, curling and groping. They explored their new surroundings, desperately looking for familiarity, for resolution. Life outside the womb was terrifying and new. He didn’t know what to reach for, or why he was reaching. His hands, long fingers tipped with soft, flexible nails, yearned for a truth to grasp onto. Perhaps they were seeking a calloused, broken finger to hold.
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My father never once laid a hand on me – not out of anger. He never had to. When you are young and the man in the house stands six feet four, weighs two hundred twenty pounds, and employs a tone which could make the walls shake, you dare not test the limits of his strength.
I was seven the first time I remember the strength of my father’s hands. My mother was in the kitchen, and he in his recliner. She was trying to open a jar of sauce to make sloppy joes, or spaghetti, or cover a meatloaf. All her usual methods had let her down – banging it lightly on the counter, using the strange yellow rubber pad she got as a free gift for hosting her umpteenth Tupperware party, running it under hot water, tapping it with a spoon. After exhausting all of these techniques, she handed the jar to my father, who sat quietly in his chair, watching Night Court, or Cheers, or Taxi or St. Elsewhere. He gave the lid a squeeze with no luck. A second try yielded similar results. On his third attempt, my father sat upright in the chair, grasped the jar with his right hand and, like a vice, turned the lid with his left. The lid held fast.
For a brief moment, the two stood in locked combat. Then, as if it had never been sealed, the jar gave. It didn’t just give though. As the tension released, so did the contents of the jar. Sauce covered the room – the carpet, his recliner, the walls, my father. The room, once monotone in hue, now came alive with color. The wood panel walls, painted over with antique white semi-gloss Glidden paint, showed red like a Jackson Pollock painting. Drops of the freed Ragu sizzled as they hit the television, burned by the heat of the screen. My father sat calmly, holding the jar in his hands, a look of disbelief covered his face. In the spectacle of exploding spaghetti sauce, I failed to realize what had just happened. It was not actually the lid that gave, it was the jar itself. My father had just twisted the sealed jar of sauce into two pieces.
We ordered pizza.
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I remember as a child holding my father’s hand. How safe it felt. My whole hand grasping a single finger, inspecting the cuts and scrapes on his knuckles, the dried paint in his cuticles which never seemed to leave. I watched him hold the paintbrush, guide the paint around the doorframes, the window sills, the baseboards. I watched his hands, envious, as he cracked open pecans or walnuts while I struggled to use the awkward metal nutcrackers at my grandmother’s house.
I watched those hands, rough and rugged, hard and calloused, turn soft and tender when he needed to fish a bamboo splinter from my hand, when he leaned over me at the kitchen table to show me how to solve a math problem. Hard hands that turned soft when he tied my tie those Sundays mornings – cross over, loop and pull, around and through the hole, snug and tight around his little man’s neck. I saw my father, with his aching hands, bloody and cracked, squash a wasp on his own neck, never once wincing in pain, then turn and help my grandmother out of the car. I watched them cradle my newborn son’s head as he sang him a lullaby.
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Earlier this year, my son and I went to Target to get a pack of Pokémon cards, or a Lego set, or a nerf gun, or a birthday present, or all of these things. When we arrived, both the parking lot and store were full. Instinctively, I reached my hand down for my son’s, as was standard parking lot protocol, and he obediently took it. We traversed the lengthy parking lot, immersed in conversation about a “mega something or other” super powerful Pokémon card he was hoping for. We crossed the parking lot, entered the store through multiple sets of double doors and headed toward the toy section.
It was here, somewhere between the produce and pharmacy aisles, that I noticed my son still had a firm hold of my hand. Instinctively, the machismo in me thought to pull my hand from his. How embarrassed he must be to have to hold his father’s hand in the store at age ten, I thought. While I pondered the devastation he must be feeling, I realized that it was he who was still holding on, and not me. It was he who continued to tell me his story, never once wondering if what he was doing was awkward or unusual. He simply held his father’s hand as we walked. It was I who was at risk of escalating a harmless situation.
It was I who questioned whether or not I was embarrassing him. I thought about myself at ten, and what I would have done. I thought about what my father would have done, or the other fathers around me, or the fathers on television. That didn’t matter. I didn’t care what they would have done, or what I would have done at age ten. Enjoy this, I told myself, it won’t last forever. One day he won’t hold your hand, or crawl into your bed when he has an alligator/lake/shark dream, just like you stopped crawling into your dad’s bed. That day will come, but it wasn’t today.
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Photo credit: Getty Images