Person on the Page

My thanks to Jeff Cann, whose Windows to My Soul inspired me to keep thinking aobut hands.

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When I was a child, my father taught me that the height of a horse is measured in hands. He demonstrated on his own horse, Azure, placing his hand sidelong up the length from the hoof to the shoulder. Azure measured 15 hands. At approximately four inches per hand, that meant he was 60 inches tall.

I’ve always been a watcher of hands. Not like the people, so named, who read people’s palms to determine their personality traits or predict their future. I don’t claim to be a chiromancer. Rather, people’s hands draw my attention: their appearance, their movements, the things they do.

As he moved it up the horse’s leg to the shoulder, my father’s hand was beautiful. Skin youthfully smooth, nails perfectly trimmed, fingers well proportioned and graceful—he had gentlemanly hands, I thought. At the dinner table, too, they caught my eye. Holding a piece of buttered bread, cutting his meat, lifting his glass to his lips, water droplets on its surface wetting his fingertips.

For me, my father’s hands were the standard for hands in general, the rule for what the hands of a human being, a man, a father should be.

The human hand was one of the earliest measuring instruments; its span from the outstretched thumb to the outstretched little finger comprises a unit of length relied upon by ancient Chinese, African, and European cultures. Likewise, the width of the hand across the knuckles that join the fingers to the palm was a common measure. The width of the thumb became what Europeans knew as an inch. The human hand’s shape and size connected people throughout history to their environments, not only through touch, but through the relationship of its dimensions to the things of this world.

At age 57, my father died. His hands maintained their youthfulness and seeming gentility to the end.  I remember them as forever young and strong.  When I think of him, I see them still.  

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When I delivered my firstborn, Jenny, and saw her for the first time, her fingers seemed supernaturally long. Emerging from the drug-induced twilight of labor, I thought they were so long that if she pointed them at the sky, she could touch a star. A moonglow aura emanated from each tiny fingertip. I wondered how this otherworldly being had planet-danced her way into my womb. She would grow long-limbed and lithe, I thought. She would be a pianist. 

A few days ago, Jenny sent me a photo of a stargazer lily growing in her backyard in Oregon, its huge fuchsia petals rimmed in startling white. Beside the flower, Jenny’s outstretched hand reaches across the expanse of the bloom to show that it measures from her extended thumb to the tip of her middle finger. Somewhere between infancy and adulthood, her hands have taken on human dimensions. Her fingers now touch stargazers rather than stars.

I know nothing about how to read hands the way palmists do. The practice of examining them for what they may reveal about a person’s character or future probably began in ancient India, but it has been pursued by people in cultures throughout the world.

Thinkers from Aristotle to Carl Jung considered the possibility that the details of the hand reveal the person. The shape and terrain of the palm have been thought to reveal human traits. The networks of lines are considered to be like hieroglyphs, narrating the story of a person’s potential future—longevity, fertility, susceptibility to disease, intellect.  

I do not know what the life, heart, and head lines on the palm reveal. I don’t even know where to look for them. I know only that people’s hands give me an instinctive impression about them. 

…..

Hands are always busied in the boardroom. They communicate. Their gestures augment language or they speak a language of their own, filling in gaps where words won’t suffice. 

When I was a university administrator, I attended frequent meetings. I observed my colleagues as they argued their positions, made recommendations for improvements, warned of approaching challenges, or shared information about the campus. As I listened to their words, I watched their hands.

The business school dean moved hers, manicured and bejeweled, perpetually as she talked, as if her motions generated the energy needed to push out her words. Her red nails flashed on the air, making her hands always a part of her message. A hand talker, some called her.  

The chief administrator spoke in five-paragraph essays, using his fingers to punctuate points one, two, and three.

The provost, notorious for indecision and duplicity, laid his milky hands passively on the conference table. They revealed nothing.

…..

Since I’ve grown older, I barely recognize mine. Other parts of my body have also changed. Those I can ignore because I don’t have to look at them. I keep my eyes trained ahead; I avoid mirrors. But I have to see my hands.

Gerontologists say changes in the appearance of our hands over time are to be expected. Not only that, but their ability to function as the tools we have relied upon all our lives decreases, due to deterioration of our skeletal, muscular and neurological systems. Our hands show us signs of the changes happening throughout our bodies.

No matter what I do, my hands are there doing it with me. They remind me I am aging. They show me the truth. Veins protrude now; my fingers are fleshier and don’t look as long as they once did; the skin is not as smooth and bears a web of lines that mimic a network of highways, all of which lead to the end.

But I’m not there yet. Still time left, still plenty to do, I hope.  

I have read people by looking into their eyes. But also, perhaps more clearly, by watching their hands. Always there, visible, doing what they do, changing with time, they offer themselves to our observation. They tell a story.

Now, mine seem a strange amalgam of my gentrified father’s and hard-working mother’s hands. They don’t seem wholly mine anymore—more a reflection of what led me here to the present.  But they are always with me like sad facts, bearing their doomed timeline, their roadmap to nowhere.

Still doing, though. Still here.

Cover Image: Property of Jenny Kreiger