Person on the Page

Daddy’s were beautiful. 

At the table, holding a piece of buttered bread. Cutting meat, lifting his glass to his lips, water droplets on its surface wetting his fingertips.

When he looked behind him before backing up the car, he reached his right hand over the front seat. From the backseat, I stared at it.  

Skin youthfully smooth, nails perfectly trimmed, fingers graceful, the ring he wore—the one that signified he was a Mason—so familiar it seemed a part of him.

When Jenny was born and I saw her for the first time, her fingers seemed supernaturally long, as if she could point them at the sky and touch a star.

Moonsparkle shot from each tiny tip. 

That first look told me she was not quite of this world—this one who somehow planet-danced her way into my womb. She would grow long-limbed and lithe, but before the rest of her grew, her fingers. 

A pianist, I thought.

My colleagues at the university: a culture of hands.

One milky-skinned dean’s—nails manicured and painted, always moving as she talked.  A hand talker, they said.

The chief administrator, who spoke in five-paragraph essays, holding up fingers to punctuate points one, two, and three. 

And the provost, noted for chronic indecision, laying his passively on the conference table.

Three years ago, I married a man. His are a language, a signal to pause, to breathe, to be still and feel that everything is all right.

They do: lots of things like grilling and typing and fixing the washer.  But they also are: there always—as promised—a reminder, a warm comfort.

Sometimes I hardly recognize mine.

A strange amalgam of my gentrified father’s and my elbow-grease-and-spit-polish mother’s.

Looking older now. Always with me like sad facts, a doomed timeline, a map of the road ahead.

Still doing, though. Still surviving.

Cover Image: Max D Pixel at Pixabay