The hands that tell of life and love

The Boston Globe

BEVERLY BECKHAM

I am my father's daughter. I have his hands, old hands, worker's hands, calloused and sun damaged. And I have his ways. His ways I accept. The hands stun me. I look at them and they are his, only smaller; the fingers short, the knuckles creased, the veins like tree roots too close to the surface. How and when did this happen?

My father's hands fixed things. They were exact, like tweezers, plucking tubes from the back of our TV, testing them, until the one that was making the picture arc was found. They built things. Drawers in my room. A trellis for the front walk. A patio where we wrote our names in cement. They scraped and painted my first two-wheeler -- a used, rusty old bike that they scoured and shined. And they steadied me as I rode it up and down the street, until I said to let go.

My father's hands gave me the keys to my first car, a relic that they buffed to the max. And they held my hands on my wedding day and they let go of my hands forever almost two years ago.

When I was young and my father was young, too, the hair that sprang up between his knuckles and nails was thick and dark. I used to ask him why he had hair on his fingers when no one else I knew did. When he was old, this hair was still thick but white. It identified him. I have these hairs, too, only they're so light people don't see. But I see.

I see more of my father in me every day. When he was 77, he got a phone call one January night from a man who said, "Is this Larry Curtin? Well, I'm your brother." We flew to Florida to meet this brother. My father didn't want to go. He didn't want to believe that his mother and father had given away their first child. And he may never have believed, if he hadn't met this brother who had his eyes, his wit, and his hands.

My father kept journals. Not conventional ones; he didn't write down his thoughts. But he wrote down the temperature. And weather conditions. And what he ate. And if he got a haircut. And when the Red Sox won. And what he bought at Home Depot. And if I called him. He put silver stars on the days I called, and at the end of every month he counted them, then graded me. I got mostly Bs, never an A+, as he frequently reminded me. But on days when I called twice, he gave me a gold star. My father kept track of some strange things.

I do, too. Not the same strange things. But I have a journal, in which I sometimes record the weather. And I have a journal of favorite quotes. And a dead book, which is really a journal that memorializes dead people. And since last year I've been keeping a gardening journal, too. It's the gardening journal that got me staring at my hands and thinking about my father. It was early morning, a time he loved, quiet and cool, and I was cutting and taping -- something he did, too, and writing about how the Miss Kim didn't bloom this year, and how the rabbits have eaten every one of the clematis, and where I bought the Mohican Viburnum -- when I saw my hand. And it was his hand. And his Scotch tape and his coffee cup and his soul inside of me.

And I remembered my father unscrewing the cardboard backing on our old TV, and my "new" old bike and our names in cement and his hands always helping me.

In the weeks before he died, I sat by his side and tried to picture him as his mother's son -- fat fingers, rosy cheeks, dark curls -- fresh from a bath, life pulsing through him. But I never knew him this way. He told me he was lucky, that he'd survived five years as a soldier and more than 20 as a police officer. That he'd loved watching his grandchildren enter the world. And I held his hands -- pale now, the skin paper thin, but big still, bigger than mine -- and I told him that I was lucky, too.