On Thumbs and Lips

If I recall correctly, the first time the lighting struck was when my Dad and I were driving to Wisconsin and I studied intently his right hand on the steering wheel. I was young, became dumbstruck, actually marveled, that our thumbs were nearly identical. Well, not exactly IDENTICAL...not then...no. Not quite then. Back then, decades ago before he died, my Father’s thumbnails were far more striated. Just like my thumbnails appear today...decades later.

There was no mistaking the fact that our thumbs were nearly identical in form and appearance. Granted, my Dad’s fingers were hewed somewhat rougher. He was a manual laborer after all. I, a coddled student. Still. There was symmetry. There was the length, girth, shape and color of the nail, the creases, the pigmentation, the essence of a thumb shared by Father and Son.

I drew (and continue to draw) great pleasure in that.

Years later, we sat together in a garret with my long-lost grandfather. Someone said something funny and all three - Grandfather, Father and Son, convulsed in laughter. It struck me then, like a thunderclap, that we three laughed identically.

Fast forward a decade plus. I sift through albums of photographs of my Father...now gone. I contemplate his visage as a younger man. A man kinda my age, and I realize: we have identical lips!

And so it came to be that I’ve come to know that my Father passed on his lips and thumbs to me.

When nights are darkest...when all is hopelessly lost...I contemplate my thumbs, stare into a tarnished mirror. I reflect upon the fact that I sprang from someone beautiful.

And I greet the dawn.

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