Pretty Hands

Surely not those of a construction worker

The hands playing the piano in the above photo are NOT my hands. That is just a free public domain photo from Pixabay. I could not play the piano if my life depended on it. Besides, my hands are a lot prettier than the hands in that photo.

All my life I have had both men and women tell me that I have pretty hands.

If you were to look at a photograph of just my face and nothing else you would probably come to the conclusion that I am an old fogey and you would be correct.

If you were to look at a photograph of just my hands and nothing else you would probably come to the conclusion that I was in my early to mid-thirties. And you would be wrong.

There is not a single liver spot on my hands; no age wrinkles or callouses or hyper-pronounced blood vessels. No scars. No deformities. My fingernails are immaculately maintained and reveal robust health (one can tell a lot about someone’s health by the condition of their fingernails). There are no bulging knuckles or misshapen bones. The skin is soft and smooth and completely unblemished. If my hands were just a little more slender they could be mistaken for the hands of a girl.

But over the course of the last couple of weeks that has suddenly changed!

I have done plenty of manly menial labor over the course of my life. I’ve done construction, I’ve worked as a stone mason, I’ve worked as a dishwasher and a migrant farmer. My hands have endured all manner of abuse but they have always healed once I stopped using them for manly things. They always returned to their near-pristine prettiness.

My hands are very important to me and the primary reason for this is that I am a writer. I write with my hands. One of the reasons my hands are so youthful is that the main thing I use them for is typing. Typing is very gentle on the hands. No callouses or bruises. No cuts. No splattering of hot grease. One could type millions upon millions of words, as I have, and one’s hands do not age one iota because of that. It’s no wonder I still have pretty hands at my age.

Back in high school I took a typing class. This was back when typing was still taught in school. My brother and male friends all asked me why I would do such a nerdy thing.

I had two answers: 1.) I wanted to be a writer, and 2.) What teenage boy wouldn’t want to be the only boy in a class full of girls?

I scored the second highest on the speed-typing test at the end of the year out of 96 students (94 of which were female). I typed 134 words per minute with zero errors. Only one girl typed faster than me. She typed 135 words per minute. I asked her out but she said no.

Nowadays I am probably down to about 120 to 125 words per minute but it is not due to the slowing down of the hands but rather to a slight slowing down of the old noggin. Still, I am a pretty darn good typist. If I were a multi-millionaire I would probably take out an insurance policy with Lloyd’s of London on my hands, much like Liberace did.

For the last couple of weeks I have been using my hands for something other than typing. I have been building. I have been sawing (with a hand saw, not an electric saw). I have been sanding and screwing and hammering and painting. This afternoon I was building for almost six hours. My body was sore all over but especially in my hands. I was sweating like a luau pig. I decided to take a break.

And then I looked at my hands! To my utter horror I saw that I had three callouses on my hands; two on my left hand and one on my right (being right-handed you’d think it would be the other way around). It has been almost a quarter of a century since I have had callouses on my hands! Seriously! My soft, blemish-free girlie hands suddenly looked like the hands of a construction worker. I was mortified. And when I moved my hands and fingers I realized that they were very sore and achy. What had I done?

So I took leave of my construction project, leaving all the tools where they were. I made myself a cup of tea and went to my writing desk and booted up the old laptop. I desperately needed to do some writing. I had no earthly idea what to write about but I needed to see if I could still type and, if so, how painful it would be given the sudden condition of my hands.

I take good care of my hands. They are just too important to me. Had I gone too far with this silly construction project? Had I put my writing in jeopardy? Would my hands still be able to perform at their normal level? Would it hurt to write?

Well, I have been writing for quite a while and the tea is long finished and to my immense relief I see that my typing has not suffered at all due to the building I had put my hands through. It does not even hurt to type. I am so happy about this!

Now, if only I can think of something to write about…

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