Hands Tell a Story

Hands told me a lot about my parents, especially during my growing up years.

Their hands defined them, indicating their strengths, their personalities, their desires, and often their fears.

During my youth, Dad’s hands were embedded with black printers’ ink. His fingernails chewed down to the halfmoon quick, his fingers flying across the keys on the linotype machine in the noisy backshop of the newspaper office. He used only one finger of each hand, pounding hard on each key spewing out slices of metal with letters and numbers embedded in the edges.

It was the world of printing when I was a child in the 1940s and 1950s, before the stench of melting metal, ink covered trays of words and numbers, and the deafening clacking of the gangly, complicated machine turning liquid metal into lines of sentences and messages were replaced by computers.

The days of Dad’s ink-stained hands ended when hot-type printing became obsolete.

Mother’s hands were far less marred by the rigors of publishing, but were constantly busy, typing out news stories on a used and abused Underwood typewriter, designing ads for town businesses, answering phone calls, and helping customers who wanted wedding invitations or business cards printed.

Her fingers were long and tapered perfect for playing the piano as she was taught at the early age of four. Her fingers had been trained to glide across keys to create music, but quickly they learned to master the keys of the typewriter to create words.

Her wedding band was simple, no diamonds, just a wide scrolled ring on her left hand. And often her fingers would twitch with a tune she didn’t know she was playing in her mind.

The differences in their hands made them a good team to succeed in the newspaper business. They each brought their hand skills to the workplace, Dad pounding out the tensions of the dirty and noisy machines, and Mother projecting and creating calmness to the public.

Away from work, their hands created similar emotions in the community. Dad’s hands expressed excitement, tension, nervousness, fun and noise. Mother’s hands produced expectations, peace, and dogged determination. Their hand gestures also were a guide to our home life offering two worlds, one bold, fun, loud and often explosive, the other quiet, peace seeking, smooth, and planning.

Mother and Dad’s hands told conflicting, interesting, differing and confusing stories, ending with a divorce after 28 years of opposing hand signals. But I will remember printer’s ink, slim moving fingers, and the fascinating pictures they each painted with those busy and unique hands.