Have you ever actually looked at your hands? I was having some yogurt when I got home tonight, and suddenly noticed my hands, as if I was seeing them through a camera. I put the yogurt down and sort of sat there at the table, looking at my hands.
They're not large, they're not all the elegant -- I could never be a hand model, except possibly as the "before" picture in a hand cream commercial -- but they're fairly strong. There's a small scar on the back of my left hand, a scar I got when I was eighteen. I was picking Margie, our fat cat, up, and she got excited by something and scrambled to get away, scratching me deeply. I'd been scratched by cats, but this one scarred. It's gotten harder to see, and probably no one but me notices any more, but it's there.
My right thumb seems dented by hold the oboe. Most of my fingers have small calluses. I have terribly cuticles and uneven-shaped nails. I'd have to say there are hands for work, not for show.
My father had one finger that was a little misshapen. He'd broken it when he was young. My grandfather had taken his sons out to show them how to shoot a gun, and apparently the rifle had kicked back, breaking my father's finger. I think he was eight or nine, probably too small for the gun. The broken finger never healed correctly, and while it wasn't an obvious thing, if he held his hands up next to one another, you saw immediately they didn't match.
I think that that incident might also have had an influence in his opposition to war and to guns. He never wanted to have anything to do with them, and I don't think that sat well with my grandfather.
The ripple effects that incidents, long ago, have on how I think and feel now, is strange. I'm not even sure why I don't like guns. I just always have, and it probably comes from my father, and so in a way, my dislke of them comes from one incident in Wisconsin in 1940, almost thirty years before I was born.
I'm a product of events and influences I can't even see or imagine.