My Father’s Hands
…are cracking.
His hands clench, unclench, clench, unclench before he shakes them out, trying to dislodge the ache from his joints. His hands have borne decades of twisting bulbs, cabling wires, fixing and lifting and placing and crimping. He massages the base of his thumb, first one, then the other. He gingerly peels the tape from his fingertips. He needs to be fast, fast and precise, all day long. The tape keeps his fingernails attached.
He also sprawls out on the couch to watch TV. Some things have stayed the same.
My father’s hands have built walls and torn them down, subdued criminals, and coddled babes. For nearly 30 years, his hands have held the roof over our heads. Now, they are working as hard as ever, but they are also older than they have ever been.
I drove to the train-station one February night to pick him up after work. The likeliness of his being there lay somewhere between the geese flying south for the winter and the sun rising tomorrow. He kept to his schedule. In the distance, the sheer silver wall of the train trundled off with a huff and he emerged, as I had known he would, from between the train tracks and the building.
My eyes were drawn to his hands and the plastic grocery bags they held. Our family lined trash bins in leftover grocery bags just like them; for years, I’d helped him throw out similar bags full of garbage. He shuffled uncertainly toward the car, opened the back doors and placed the bags in them carefully, settling them with a pat. I readied a joke as he got in the car but he paused before shutting the passenger door and it died in my throat. He looked deep into the dashboard, his hand still on the door.
“I got laid off.” Then he looked at me to make sure, as though my hearing his words made them real. They were. They settled into me like so much tossed trash. There was nowhere else to put them, so I just turned to the wheel and drove while I tried to digest it.
Ever since we had moved into the suburbs a decade and a half ago, my dad commuted 3 hours a day to make sure we could attend school in good districts. He worked overtime every chance he got to pay for our college tuition. But thirty years of service at the Merchandise Mart had come to an end, just a few years short of his retirement age.
“If I had a choice,” he would often tell us with a grin, “I wouldn’t do anything! I would just watch TV. But I gotta work.”
My father’s hands are tough, thick from work, and dexterous. But they are cracking.
I work so my father doesn’t have to.
