{"id":17845,"date":"2022-03-21T14:13:08","date_gmt":"2022-03-21T18:13:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/?p=17845"},"modified":"2024-08-27T16:57:58","modified_gmt":"2024-08-27T20:57:58","slug":"hands-tell-a-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/2022\/hands-tell-a-story\/","title":{"rendered":"Hands Tell a Story"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n Hands Tell a Story\n <\/h1>\n \n \n <\/header>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n

Hands Tell a Story
\nStretching to stand his tallest, my father measured in at 5\u20198\u201d. His hands were proportional to his height, just filling the men\u2019s medium gloves left for him under the tree every other Christmas. Their strength was more proportional to those of a much larger man, maybe a six-footer. A lifetime of hard work has a way of developing hands with underestimated strength. The skin on his palms was tough with calluses built up in proportion to the labour performed.
\nMy father was a railway man, a \u201cGandy Dancer\u201d maintaining track along the CNR lines crisscrossing Manitoba. Heavy work demands a tight grip on an arsenal of heavy tools: bars, shovels, hammers, jacks, drills and saws. Bad things happen to kilometers of steel tracks baked by the relentless sunshine of the cloudless prairie skies. In the cold of winter, steel contracts to the point where it snaps at weak points. Water trapped in the railbeds heaves the tracks as it freezes. Trains cannot change tracks when the switch points are jammed shut with snow packed in tightly by prairie gales.
\nIn the summer months, his hands took on a swarthy tone not at all resembling those of someone with Polish ancestry. In the winter months, the tan faded revealing that they did belong to a man of fair complexion. It is not true that Jack Frost nips at your fingers. In the prairie windchills, he bears his fangs and gnaws on them through layers of leather mitts and woolen liners splitting fingertips and cuticles.
\nMy father wore a simple wedding band but never to work. As a young man, he farmed on his family\u2019s land in Poland. Three months after the start of WWII, he was \u201cinvited\u201d to work on a farm in Germany. Refugees at the end of WWII, my father and mother met and married at the Displaced Person\u2019s camp in Altenstadt-Schongau, Germany. Their wedding rings were crafted in the camp from a melted silver five Reichsmark coin. Fifty cents well spent!
\nWhen his education finished after fifth grade, he was expected to make a man\u2019s contribution in working the family farm. Milking cows and slopping hogs were chores to be handed down to one of his twelve siblings while he took on heavier jobs with his father and brother. They had cleared some trees and loaded the logs onto a cart. My father was securing the load with chains when the horse lurched shifting the logs. He lost part of his left-hand index finger at first knuckle when it was crushed by the chain. My father was always self-conscious of that finger.
\nMy father was frustrated that his hardest work was written into the last chapter of his life. Shuffling a handful of steps exhausted him. Just before the start of his funeral service, family gathered for a private last goodbye. I saw him thin and gaunt from illness. I noticed his hands laying crossed left over right on his chest. He would have been happy that in the last sentence of his story, his family took care to ensure that his hands were repositioned to hide his missing finger.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hands Tell a Story Stretching to stand his tallest, my father measured in at 5\u20198\u201d. His hands were proportional to his height, just filling the men\u2019s medium gloves left for him under the tree every other Christmas. Their strength was more proportional to those of a much larger man, maybe a six-footer. A lifetime of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-memoir"],"acf":{"cu_post_thumbnail":false},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17845"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17845\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17873,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17845\/revisions\/17873"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}