HANDS

I'm rather afraid that I will bore whatever unfortunate reader comes across this blog with endless excerpts from "In Short." Be that as it may, I can't resist posting one more for now. This is a truly beautiful piece called "Hands," by Ted Kooser.


More and more frequently since I entered my fifties I have begun to see my father's hands out at the ends of my arms. Just now, the left and more awkward one lies curled in my lap while the right one massages the beard on my chin. On the ring finger of the left is the silver wedding band that my wife gave me, not my father's gold ring with its little yellow sapphire. But I am not deceived; this wearing of my ring on his ring finger is part of my father's respectful accommodation of me and of my life and marriage. Mine have succeeded his, which is, ash he would have said, only as it should be.
I recognize his hands despite the ring. They are exactly as I remember them from his own middle age-wrinkled,of course, with a slight sheen to the tiny tile work of the skin; with knotted, branching veins; and with this dark hair that sets our from beneath the shirt cuffs as if to cover the hand but that within as inch thins and disappears as there were a kind of glacial timberline there. There is, as we know, a field of coldness just beyond the reaching tips of our fingers and this hair has been discouraged and has fallen back.
As a young man my father had been a drapery salesman in a department store and his hands were ever after at their best when smoothing fabric for display-the left one holding a piece of cloth unrolled from a bolt while the right lovingly eased and teased the wrinkles form it, his fingers spread and their tips lightly touching the cloth as if under the was something grad and alive like the flank of a horse. I can feel the little swirls of brocade beneath the ball of his thumb.
These hands have never done hard physical work, but they are not plump, or soft, or damp and cool. Nor are their nails too carefully clipped or too carefully buffed and polished. They are firm, solid, masculine hands, and other men feel good about shaking them. They have a kind of brotherly warmth and when they pinch the selvage of the drapery fabric and work it just a little between thumb and finger they do it with power and confidence. There are pair of hands like these- some brown, some black, some white-in every bazaar in the world-hands easing and smoothing, hands flying like doves through the dappled light under time-riddled canvas.
I would like to be held by these hands, held by them as they were when I was a child and I seemed to fall within them wherever I might turn, I would like to feel them warm and broad against my back and would like to be pressed to the breast of this man with his faint perfume of aftershave, with the tiny brown moles on his neck, with the knot of his necktie slightly darkened by perspiration. Now he has taken his glasses off and set them on the mantel and there are small red ovals on the sides of his nose. I reach to touch them and find the wet, as if I were touching something deep inside him. Now I hear him singing, softly singing, the words buzzing deep in his chest.
But these old hands of his are past all that. They lie side by side in my lap, their palms turned up as if to catch this fleeing moment as it falls away. But as I peer down into them they begin to move on their own, to turn and shift. I watch the left hand slowly rise to place its palm against my heart. and watch the right rise swiftly to enfold the other.




-Ted Kooser (Hands)