Redtree Times

I have always regarded manual labour as creative and looked with respect – and, yes, wonder – at people who work with their hands. It seems to me that their creativity is no less than that of a violinist or painter.

-Pablo Casals

I came across this shot of working hands and it made me think of how I’ve viewed hands through my life. I’ve always looked at people’s hands since I was a child. The liver spotted hands of my grandmother had thin ivory fingers that seemed like translucent china, for instance.

Growing up, the hands of our landlord Art, an old farmer [and a onetime bootlegger but that’s a story for another day], were thick and strong and missing at least one digit down to the knuckle on several of his fingers, the result of an ornery, impatient personality and dangerous farm machinery. Not a great match. It was not uncommon to see quite a few farmers with missing fingers and limbs back in the day.

Fat Jack, who I wrote about here a long time back, had hands whose nails were longer than you might expect and permanently rimmed with the black from the oil and grease of the machines and engines on which he was always working. They were similar to the photo above. His hands were round and plump, like Jack himself, but surprisingly soft and nimble, good for manipulating the small nuts and bolts of his world.

There was a manager when I was in the world of automobiles I worked under a manager who was a great guy and fantastic salesman. However, he had extremely soft and damp hands. It was like handling a dead fish when you shook hands.

A cool, mushy, damp, boneless fish.

As a kid and now, I have admired working hands. They reflect their use so perfectly, the scars and callouses serving as badges of honor and the thick muscularity of the fingers attesting to the time spent at labor. They seem honest with nothing to hide. They are often direct indicators of that person’s life and world.

My own hands have changed over the years. They were once more like working hands, calloused and thickening from many hours spent with a shovel. There are a number of small scars from screwdrivers that jumped from the screwhead and into the flesh time and time again. There’s another on the end of my middle finger from when I cut the very end of it off while trying to cut a leather strap with a hunting knife.

Not a great idea but, hey, I never claimed to be Einstein.

I always felt confident when my hands were harder and stronger. Now, I have lost some of that thickness of strength and the fingers are thinner and a bit softer from doing less manual labor. Plus, the passing years have provided a few more creases and age spots.

I look at them now and wonder how I would have judged them when I was younger, when I would normally measure someone by their hands. That’s something I don’t do now. I now know there are so many more and better ways to measure a life. That was made clear to me once I realized that the work of the mind was a possibility – something that seemed a million miles away then.

But, even now, when I come across working hands, strong and hard, I find myself admiring them still.

This post has ran a couple of times over the years, generally around Labor Day. I have always admired hard workers, people who didn’t swerve away from having to use their hands and backs to get something done. I have been a hard worker at times though in recent years I have spent as much time, maybe more, as a bone-idle slob.

I like myself a lot more when I am the hard worker.

Have a good Labor Day.