Missing Fingers and Fibs
I’ll never know how dad and his brothers lost their fingers, but in our family, you didn’t ask questions.
My father was missing his pinky finger. It was hard to see, as he often held his hand in a fist which made it look like it was there. He wore a diamond on one ring finger and a sapphire and diamond gold ring on his wedding finger. He also wore a big, heavy gold ID bracelet engraved with his nickname “Banjo” around his wrist. All of this bling somehow detracted from the missing finger.
I remember as a kid asking how dad lost his finger.
“He was jumping off a truck when he was younger and caught his ring on the metal part of the window and pulled off his finger,” mom said.
Sounded reasonable enough. I never once questioned it again until many years later. My family and I drove to see our “other” family in San Diego. Our other family consisted of an extension of my father’s best friend’s family. These people are as close to us as blood.
Somehow the subject of missing fingers came up. According to my aunt, my father wasn’t the only one with a missing finger. There were uncles and cousins with missing fingers, but it was how they lost their digits that was the most interesting. Each story was almost exactly the same. The only thing that varied was where the metal was that the ring got caught on. Sometimes it was a car, other times it was metal on a roof.
My aunt said something that stuck with me. I asked her how it was possible that all these men lost their fingers in accidents. “Doesn’t this sound a bit coincidental?” I asked.
“We never asked questions,” she said.
While a missing finger among uncles and cousins might not seem that significant, untimely deaths and elaborate family cover-ups that result in the realization that everything you held sacred was a ruse, is maddening.
