Because hands can do everything but lie.

I don’t always know what to do with my hands.

You might find that ironic for an actor, even more so for an educator. But, it’s still the truth.

Bang, bang, you shot me down.

It wasn’t anything I ever really noticed until a few years ago. I began to realize that my Nana was fascinated by the frequency with which I used my hands to animate my conversation. She would look less at me and more at my gesturing.

Over time, I became so concerned with how I might physcially be telling my story that I began to grow flustered at the dinner table. I didn’t know how not to use my hands.

As is my way and tendency, I began to obsess over excessive hand usage soon after.

It was a quiet thing, this staring that Nana did (does; I still struggle with it) to my hands, and, as you might have guessed, it has now become a habit of my own: to notice how often people use their hands to exemplify their points, even when it’s not necessary.

Like, the man at the four-way stop, yesterday, who flipped me off.  (Although I suppose one could argue that that is necessary. But, I would have to counter with, No, it isn’t. No one ever gets the Four-Way Stop Rule, right, anymore. And on top of that, it’s actually a five-way stop. That’s right, a five-way stop).

For Nana, gentlemen didn’t need to use their hands for support. Their word was strong enough. I think she sees it as a sign of weakness, perhaps, that succeeding generations need more and more stimuli to keep them engaged. That’s a point to consider, indeed, but for some of us, it’s just a natural extension of our physical selves to use our appendages for emphasis.

She’s a picture of Victorian essence, though, and that I respect.

Even if her essence has made me somewhat self-conscious, and thus, critical.

We often hold others accountable for what we fail at ourselves, don’t we? I can’t not think less of someone who does that very thing I do, that I don’t like in myself. At least, not initially.

All this and over hands. Silly, huh?

But, not a new idea.  I’m sure there are other Nanas the world over who carry such social concerns, tucked right beneath the handkerchief kept so tightly under their wristwatch bands or heirloom bracelets.

The problem for me, ultimately, is in finding something else for them to do, when I talk, if gesturing is a weakness in men. It’s like I’ve given my hands permission to think for themselves, and that, believe you me, gets me in more trouble than I can safely admit to here.

It doesn’t have to be a significant form of trouble either (or even have to involve anyone else). What it does, though, is divide my thinking, and sometimes with less than desirable results. Today, I went home, for example, to eat lunch. I stood in the kitchen scraping out the last of that delicious olive tapenade that Amanda made for the party last night, with a cut-up tomato, fresh from the garden, and I decided to do something I rarely do.

This is the lost shaker of salt.

I decided to add salt. (If you’re going to add salt, though, it is perfectly acceptable to do so with either a slice of tomato or a piece of watermelon).

I reached, without thinking, for the white salt shaker that was sitting on top of the microwave, with a fleeting realization that that, of all the available counter space in the kitchen, was an odd place to put the white salt shaker. All the same, I brought it over to the sink and raising it above my delectable slice of tomato, I shook some salt onto it.

No salt came out.

I shook it again. Still, nothing.

I was getting more and more irritated when I realized two very important things: 1) We don’t have a white salt shaker, and 2) it was, instead, the plastic insert that goes in the bottom of the food processor, which had been washed and was sitting in the drain beside the sink, drying.

Stupid hands. Just making assumptions, and in my own kitchen. (Of course, why the insert was sitting on top of the microwave – oh, never mind). 

The fools. My hands.

Maybe I’m just too dramatic. The length of a finger, the crack of a knuckle, the ability to point, to wave, to applaud. I guess I can’t just look at a hand as a hand, I mean, not to see it as a hand…I look at it and I see the ability to know God a little closer (not just through prayer, but through creation).

I can build worlds with these hands using nothing but twenty-six letters. And judging by the sore spot on my thumb, I can also attempt to construct a 8×8 foot flat, down at the theater.

Aren’t hands often the first to show signs of age? If so, then, well, why not? Building worlds take a lot out of a person. Mine, for instance, are growing chafed and calloused. I look at them, right this second, for instance, as they skate over the keyboard, and I’m a little sad but mostly impressed. What these hands have done. The good and the bad…it’s still impressive. (Take a look at your own, and you’ll see your own history…read it and memorize it).

Because hands can do everything but lie.

After my first class, this morning, I sat in the lounge and flipped through the rest of the textbook. We’re about to begin our abbreviated, quick-speed run-through of fiction this week. I wasn’t sure, still not, of which stories I want to focus on.  Welty, O’Connor, Faulkner, Wright, those are the usuals, but maybe I could find something new?

I merely turned one page, at that point, and there, on that page, lay a story I’d not only never read, but never heard of: “Hands” by Sherwood Anderson. Can you beat that?

So, I thought, well, hands aren’t perhaps a normal topic of conversation or blogging, unless you eat dinner at Nana’s on Sundays – let’s see what it’s about. Let’s read this story.

I was immediately struck by this unique and at first glance, blandly written piece of short fiction. Not the least of which was it’s not-so-subtle homosexual overtones, especially for something written in the 1910s. Admittedly, I’m not that familiar with Anderson’s thematic oeuvre but I was compelled by his fictional design in this particular story.

How sad the life of Wing Biddlebaum was. How misunderstood; note: due to an unfortunate incident, allegedly, with younger boys at the school where he used to teach, he was forced out of town and had to change his name.

Here, read this:

Wing Biddlebaum talked much with his hands. The slender expressive fingers, forever active, forever striving to conceal themselves in his pockets or behind his back, came forth and became the piston rods of his machinery of expression.
     The story of Wing Biddlebaum is a story of hands. Their restless activity, like unto the beating of the wings of an imprisoned bird, had given him his name. Some obscure poet of the town had thought of it. The hands alarmed their owner. He wanted to keep them hidden away and looked with amazement at the quiet inexpressive hands of other men who worked beside him in the fields, or passed, driving sleepy teams on country roads.

His hands “alarmed their owner.” That’s bizarre and captivating to me. After you read the story, you’ll see why for yourself. He hides behind his hands and tries to manipulate them into the working class definition of “manual” labor of the other men in this town. He succeeds too well, you might say.

This will make sense after you read the story.

Another captivation: several times throughout the story, Anderson keeps stalling, suggesting that the “truth” of this story can’t be told except by a poet. A poet that Anderson refers to several times throughout the piece. And not just any poet, an obscure one.

To me, this is the beauty of the contrast.

Obscurity has no use for hands. A poet doesn’t either. All he needs is “an eye.” The difference is that truth exists in two forms: exposed for the eye to see, or through sleight of hand. The deceit of Wing’s lavish use of his hands is nothing short of a subconscious effort to trick the eye. Watch his hands and you never see the desperation that is in his face. The worry that drains him of “place” and “home.”

I mean for godsakes, re-read the first paragraph, again. He lives in a dilapadating house on the edge of a ravine.  He’s headed for a meltdown, and one that’s been boiling for the last twenty years.

Talk about a slow burn.

Sigh.

I just hope that’s not what Nana sees when she looks at me.

Guess I better scratch gloves off my Christmas list.

He’d just always wanted a hearse, he said.

U.L. and I like to take Sunday drives, after dinner, each week.

There’s no rush to this ritual. We enjoy a long dinner with the rest of the family; we gossip, we share news (even the made-up News, an old habit we used to do when I was younger, that’s found some way to stick, even to this day).

What you do is, you mute the TV, you guess at what’s being said by looking at the graphics, and then you tell your version. It was quite a shock, for instance, when I realized that Bush had actually been re-elected, and even greater still, when I found out that Navratilova was an honest-to-goodness lesbian who barely got the rights to animal visitation; I’d thought she was trying to sell her dogs on national television and had been arrested for it. I hadn’t realized that what I’d been watching was a court trial, of a “divorce,” per se.

This will be the death of me.

It’s not that there’s all that many places to see or drive by in my small, Haven Kimmel-sized hometown. It just gives us time to ourselves, to draw out the necessary conversations that seem to be so much a part of this post-Sunday Dinner ritual.

I always have to do the drive, in his Cadillac, while he sits in the passenger side regaling the same stories, world without end, that he does every Sunday.  Mrs. So-and-So used to live there in that house until her nephew got high on “the drugs” and broke in and bludgeoned her to death, and then dug up that gorgoues purple clematus, for no reason at all and left a big hole in the yard; or, that house is where Old This-and-That caught fire and burned to death when lightning struck his hot water heater, he was asleep, which you shouldn’t do in an electrical storm; you know, stories like that.

It’s too, too painfully southern.

I love every minute of them, though, I really do, despite the nature of this blog. I truly relish these drives.

And every now and then, he recalls a new story, a new moment shared, a story stolen, either at a funeral home, or at Piggly Wiggly, a grocery store that he affectionately refers to as The Pig, when writing his checks there. He used to concoct grocery lists in an aisle-by-aisle fashion, so familiar was he with their layout. It certainly maximized shopping time. Gave you more time to socialize. 

I’ll have to tell you later about an incident that involved a church scavenger hunt, a cucumber, and Miss Ada Lee.

Yesterday, though, as we drove past the sod-soaked fields and yards of our neighbors, the rain has truly been remarkable and of legend, here lately – I keep anticipating animals, approaching two-by-two, gathering on the carport, staring eagerly at the Cadillac, trying to figure out how to get into it. It’s a large Cadillac, and so, somewhat similar to an ark, at least, I’d think, to present-day animals, who I imagine are about as intelligent as the rest of us in the 21st century – yet, we found ourselves taking a new road, a different route, this time.  It was only new because we usually just drive past it and not down it, it’s a dead end, but we didn’t do that yesterday. No, sir.

We drove down it, to the cul-de-sac, and there at the end was a hearse.

U.L. told me that it was an old one, from Nowell’s. And that the man who lived in this house (the one we were practically in the driveway of , so I began to turn the car around before we aroused too much suspicion), had bought it. Because he wanted it. He did not, in fact, work at Nowell’s.

He’d just always wanted a hearse, he said. 

This, U.L. discovered while purchasing some Cool Whip and fresh coconut shavings at Piggly Wiggly, preparing to make his celebrated Coconut Cake, and this man, we’ll call him Frank (because that’s his name) was standing behind him, bragging about the fact that he’d gotten a good deal on that death trap of a hearse at Nowell’s. It only had 40,000 miles on it, and they took six grand for it, as is.

To which U.L. registered surprise. The town indeed must be smaller than he thought. People died all the time around here; it was a hobby. To have only amassed 40,000 miles didn’t seem right. It should have higher mileage on it than that.

I'd rather not know what's in the back.

The man, Frank, now enjoyed driving the hearse down Highway 397, fast as he could (right up to 60 mph, he said), with his two dogs, part-Beagle/part-Yankee, he’d gotten them off a cousin in Chicago, a shovel, and a plastic tarp. He’d drive up and down 397  until he happened upon some version of roadkill, and as a free service to the city, he’d stop the car, pull the shovel out from the back (it had not come with the purchase of the car, as I’d thought) and delicately carry them off to a final resting place, one less likely to be continuously mowed over by Broncos…and Cadillacs.

I trust he had very well-behaved dogs.

U.L. said a hearse was the last thing he would want to ride in. Frank told him not to worry, it would be.

Every Sunday, we do this. Dinner, small talk, a car ride, the same stories, sometimes new ones, and I love it.

And…I also hate it.

All at the same time, I amass these feelings in my bones, in my blood, my knuckles, and it’s usually with a fork of mashed potatoes, or butterbeans, or peach cobbler on its way to my mouth. It’s a saturating, obligatory, exhausting, and lovely wont.

One that I’ve often felt suffocated by, and I don’t like admitting that, but it’s true, because it seems too rote, rhetorical to matter.  I’d never been able to put into anything other than a simple series of words…maybe I wasn’t able to give it better context, or maybe I wasn’t supposed to, because it was of a higher order of thinking than I was able to get to on my own…

…until this morning.

Amanda, having been gone this past weekend to a wedding (yet another one!) in Memphis, had finally returned home, laden with Pottery Barn accessories for the den and bathroom, and this morning, she was starved for my attention, as best friends often become when separated (I starve for hers, as well, and we both ache and starve for Siciliana’s, Erin’s, and vice versa…would that we could all be thinner from such friendly famine – which is just slightly less oxymoronic than friendly fire, to the soul, anyway), she came bounding into my bedroom and woke me up.

It was noon, so I, now that I’m fully awake, have forgiven her. But, in her usual way, she had a passage she wanted to share with me.  This is something we all do, and constantly, this sharing works with each other. Usually, Amanda has more profound (and, also, published) pieces to share with me: cummings, Yeates, Hurston, et al. She is, I’d argue, far more well read than any of us, especially me.

Despite being famously non-auditory in almost anything I do, I humor her and listen. It’s a selection from Robert Penn Warren’s All The King’s Men. From page 35, she read:

The child comes home, and the parent puts the hooks in him. The old man, or the woman, as the case may be hasn’t got anything to say to the child. All he wants is to have that child sit in a chair for a couple of hours and then go off to bed under the same roof. It’s not love. I am not saying that there is not such a thing as love. […] But this thing in itself is not love. It’s just something in the blood. It is a kind of blood greed, and it is the fate of a man. It is the thing which man has which distinguishes him from the happy brute creation.  

I heard every word of that.

I had to look at them, actually, I had to take the book and look at the words, themselves, I was that bothered by the accuracy of his prose. Once, during my first tryst with graduate school (in English), I took a Fugitive Poets class under the remarkably affable, fatherly, likable, and slightly off-key Dr. Phillips, and had read of Warren’s poetry, along with Davidson’s and the tragic Jarrell’s, which struck me less for its poignancy and more because he stepped in front of a bus and was killed, perhaps on purpose. I’d decided, as a poet, Warren’s work was soft, if terse, and what prose we read of his, I found suggestive of needing a closer editor…I felt that way about this piece as well, but somehow it didn’t matter in this context.

The original electric chair.

I was absolutely struck by the meaning, and remembered that meaning is what the reader gets to do, gets to fiddle around with…at least, ultimately.  (I’m a Fish advocate, Reader-Response, etc.). Critics, theorists can say whatever they need to (everyone needs a job, right?), but what resonates is if the reader takes up the mallet and strikes the gong.

Nothing else matters at all.

And this passage was so captively southern, so perfectly southern, so bitterly southern, that …it finally upset me. Warren had, all those years ago, in his novel about a corrupt politician, written down so clearly what I’d been trying to say myself. I guess that’s why I couldn’t: he’d already used the words. 

And had done so, so irreproachably.

I guessed then, after the reading was over, that the only way for me to climb to this higher order, is to do what he did, what they all did…

…just, take off for the open road, and find a quiet, muted place and live out the rest of my days, a fugitive.

The monsters in my mouth.

I’m no prude, but violence in any form shocks me. (I’m rather hoping that’s a universal statement).

But, and here’s where we may differ, my response to it is to laugh. Maybe it’s a nervous habit, maybe I think it’s a deflection on my part to make it less real. I don’t know why I do it, but I laugh. And loudly.

See, what you might not know about me is that I am the world’s most foremost expert at inappropriate laughter.  It just seems easier to laugh at everything, for me.  I get tired of crying. (Though, I’ve done my share of that, too).  Let’s not dwell on that, yet…that’s not today’s focus.

This man is thoroughly enjoying his laugh.

This is: what I’ve been noticing lately is that my conversations, and by this I mean those that I happen into, like around the dinner table, out with friends, after rehearsals, etc., not ones I instigate, necessarily, I’ve noticed that they have become almost exponentially more violent in content.

That amuses me.

I wonder if we think that’s entertaining. Sure, sure, in a movie, like Die Hard or Scream or that dreadful imposition of a film called Forrest Gump, ok, that’s one thing, but in the every day? When we’re face-to-face, are we so worried that silence is too disconcerting that simply enjoying another’s presence isn’t enough, anymore? 

Either way, it makes for good conversation, I guess.

Before rehearsal, yesterday, I met a couple of friends at Old Venice, an Italian restaurant within walking distance from my house, as is the theatre. It’s terribly convenient to have them both so close, and I worry that at any moment someone will come and tell me I’ve had it made for too long, to please move.

I was a bit late, and they were already there, drinks in one hand, menus in the other, and as I sat down, Jene turned to me, in that wonderfully comic way of his (everything’s a big, fat joke to him and I like that), and announced that he’d hurt his ear. Burst the drum. He’d poked a Q-tip too far into the canal. I reminded him that the box, of course, carries a warning to the effect of: Don’t stick this Q-tip in your ear canal.

That wasn’t the point, he said.  It never is with Jene. That’s what makes him delightful company. That story, however, led us immediately down a long, winding path of physical incidents in Jene’s life. Like the time that he got hit in the left eye with a stick and for the next eight days had to go to the emergency room, before school, and meet his doctor there to have his eye scraped.

I found this irresistably funny. So, I laughed.

Jene paused. Assured me that it really was quite painful. Then, he laughed. So did, Chris. (Another one).

As is the way in the Deep South, Jene expected equal disclosure. The whole gambit of “I tell a story, you tell a story.”  We are a culture of story-telling people.  Also, we are called liars. But, we’re good ones. As Mark Twain has famously written, There’s an art to lying, as anything else. Forgive the paraphrase.

I was prepared, naturally. So, I regaled them with my most recent horror: wisdom teeth extraction. I waited late in life to have it done. For one thing, I didn’t really, really know I had any. Secondly, when I couldn’t eat for three days because my back teeth hurt, I realized then, that Yes, indeed, I had wisdom teeth, and they’d shown up just in time to be taken out. Much like an evangelist…they spoke with a vengeance.

The dentist was, how can I say it?, frankly appalled.  He took one look at my X-rays and loudly sighed. How could I not know that these monsters were in my mouth. I liked that phrase, though…don’t you.  I told him they’d never bothered me until that weekend.  He held no restraint in telling me that I was almost too old for a safe surgery.

But, that he’d try. (Of course, he would. It cost $1200.  Heck, in this recession, I’d try to take your wisdom teeth out for $20).

I signed waivers saying that I wanted to be “put under,” and that if I died, I wouldn’t sue, etc. etc.  (They didn’t ask me to include family members though. If something happened, I felt I’d be avenged.  Hell hath no fury like my Mother).

The day of the surgery came, bless Erin and Amanda for the week of torture they’d have to endure on my behalf, and I took the Valium. The nurse asked me if I had any last questions. In retrospect, this is not necessarily what you want to hear on your way “down.” I asked her if anyone had gone on to meet God from the chair I was in.

She said, “No. Not that one.”

I was out in under ten seconds.  That part is not Hollywood fiction; it’s very real. When I came to, I was drowsy and packed: cotton, gauze, my mouth was free of monsters and full of Proctor & Gamble.  The dentist said that despite my age (again with this age business) it was a textbook operation.

I asked him which edition.

He laughed, as was his social responsibility. And two days later, I had a massive nerve infection. Not a dry socket, a nerve infection. So painful that I almost committed a crime: vandalism. I didn’t though. I wasn’t able to drive to his office without assistance, and I just wasn’t willing to incriminate anyone else.

These are happy teeth. They are also fake.

I had to go, for a solid week, at the hands of mercy belonging to Erin and Amanda, God bless them, every morning back to the dentist’s office to have my “holes packed.” It is as painful as it sounds. They would stretch my jaws as widely as they could, no anesthetic, no being “put down” for this, no, no…I watched the atrocity with every last ounce of awareness one is offered by being fully awake.

The nurse took, what I imagine were Guiness Book of World Records award-winning tweezers – they were a foot long if they were an inch – and while another nurse, unseen, held my jaws open (and anytime your jaws are held open, it is always against your will), drying out my throat, the first nurse took two awful-smelling strips of yellow gauze, soaked in kerosene and castor oil and also Ipecac, I think it was, and proceeded to force them into the space previously occupied by God-given teeth.

Every morning for a week I endured this.

I could hardly speak, the taste of those stips was like having two creosote poles (crisoak, as we say down south) jammed into your gums because any foreign object put in your mouth shames it instantly; your mouth becomes offended – it begins to feel inadequate, as if it’s not doing its job. Your mouth knows what should and shouldn’t be there. I’m pretty sure that’s one of Newton’s laws, oh, and that taste, ick….nothing could get rid of it. Nothing.

I finished my story, and turned back to Jene, who stared at me. That was nowhere near as painful as having your eyeball scraped. I had to agree.  No matter how I twisted the facts around to make them more violently presentable, just merely saying the words “eyeball,” and “scraped,” in the same sentence trumps everything else.

He then rounded out the evening, at least for me – I had to get to rehearsal – by telling the embarrassingly tragic story of his 12th birthday. Having grown up with horses, in the stables not the house, he’d invited all his friends to the ranch to show off his precious, tame horse named Cantalope.

He’d been practicing and practicing pulling off a Trigger routine, which as you may recall, I believe, involved Roy Rogers jumping over the back of the horse to mount him. I think. At any rate, I’m sure it wasn’t Dale. Jene had reheared this routine a thousand times, he said, and was eager to show his friends what he could do with a horse.

And I mean, come on, the horse’s name was Cantalope. What harm could that cause.

I wouldn't trust this face, at all.

A lot, apparently. The horse panicked and kicked Jene in the genitals four quick and nearly lethal times. His mother, desperate to save him, should a fifth and sixth kick be imminent, immediately jumped the fence, grabbed her son, and tore his trousers off to inspect the damage, much to the wild-eyed amusement of all of his friends, who stood there, a mute audience.  At least until school started back, at which time they introduced to the student body a new nickname for Jene which was…

…and, that, I’m afraid is where the story ended.  He didn’t say another word, and wouldn’t.

Don’t you just hate when people do that?

I’m sure it had something to do with blue jeans, that’d be a first and obvious choice, and of course, balls.

It’s crass, I know, but then, so are most twelve-year-olds.