HANDS OF TIME.
I read this to my parents on Christmas Day…not a dry eye in the house.
They say that having long nails is a sign of a healthy body, but I think my family’s ever-growing talons may be the exception to the rule. We’ve got nails and hands that could be identified as kin, quick as landing your glance on a set of twins—they are that similar. When we gather together on holidays, with out hands clasped in a prayer circle, or in line reaching for plates and spoons, it is clear that all of our hands came from the same hardworking, yet loving stock.
My father has hands like a cowboy—rugged, detailed, chapped. Fingers so big that they can’t be measured, adorned with a Hawaiian wedding band that has happily strangled the space below the knuckle for forty years. He grew up in Richland Farms, Compton California, and those hands spent most of their childhood tending horses and chickens on our family’s land. By his teenage and college years Roger’s hands were either playing sports or to running down the street trying not to be late for work.
My father’s father was an actual cowboy, a farmer, and a sharecropper in Bakersfield, and in Oklahoma before that. Grand Poppy had hands of steel; permanent grooves with stories woven in life grout on tile. His nails were like those of eagles, with meaty fingers; callouses scraping along his inner palms. Grand Poppy would hold my hand as a child—it was like receiving a love note on hand-grip sandpaper. He meant well.
My hands have the same groove-lines, though most of my life they were used to play music and write the things I felt. These hands of mine are slender, with strong, long nails that grow wildly, just like my Dads, granddads, and my mom’s when she was my age. Just like Mom, my knuckles gather tightly at the center, looking like the scrunchy wrinkled faces of our ancestors. They are beautiful.
My mom was a model when she was young, with the leanest digits and the most astonishing lacquered red nails you could ever imagine. Her hands were like a cherry red Ferrari with smooth, chocolate leather interior. Her skin was warm and full of love; she knew how to be delicate, as models do. Now, fifty years later, she cares for my father and his aging cowboy hands. She tends to wounds he cannot always feel. Her silky, beautiful hands finally show life’s wear and tear, and yet we, her family, still reach to her for everything.
She holds our world in her palms, with the key to our familial wholeness solely on her fingertips. When I take her hand in mine and examine all of the fleshy, brown well-moisturized lines, I see her entire lifeline, and all of ours, that she carries within.
