this blog post should really have a title.

My father's hands were rough and exceedingly strong. He could draw and saw a square with quick accuracy but what i remembered most was the special warmth from those hands soaking through my shirt as he took me by the shoulder on our evening walks. They were good hands that served him well and failed him in one thing: they never learnt to write. The number of illiterates in the country has steadily declined but if there were only one, i would be saddened, remembering my father and the pain he endured because his hands never learnt to write. When he started school, the remedy for a wrong answer was ten ruler stokes across a stretched palm. For some reason, shapes, figures and recitations just did not fall into the right pattern inside his six-year-old head. Maybe he suffered from some type of learning handicap such as dyslexia. His father took him out after several months and set him to a man's job on the farm.

Years later, his wife, would try to teach him to read. Still later, i would grasp his big fist between my small hands and awkwardly help him trace the letters of his name. He submitted to the ordeal but soon grew restless. Flexing his fingers and kneading his palms, he would eventually declare that he had had enough and would depart for a long, solitary walk. Finally, one night when he thought no one saw, he slipped away with his son's second-grade reader and laboured over the words, until they became too difficult. He pressed his forehead into the pages and wept. From farm to road-building and later factory work, his hands served him well. His mind was keen, his will to work, unsurpassed. His enthusiasm and efficiency brought an offer too become a foreman, until he was handed the qualification test.

It has always been hard for him to stand before a man and make an 'X' mark for his name but the hardest moment of all was when he placed 'his mark' by the name someone else had written for him and saw another man walk away with the title deed to his beloved farm. When it was over, he stood before the window and slowly turned the pen he still held in his hands, gazing, unseeing, down the mountainside. i went out to the barn that afternoon and wept for a long, long time.

Eventually he found a cotton-mill job and we moved into a millhouse. He never quite adjusted to town life. His eyes faded and the skin across his cheekbones became a little slack. However, his hands kept their strength and their warmth soaked through when he would sit me on his lap and ask that I read to him. He took great pride in my reading and would listen for hours as i struggled through the awkward phrases. When Mother left once for a weekend to visit her sister, Dad went to the store and returned with food for dinner. After the meal he said that he had a surprise for dessert and went out to the kitchen where could hear him opening a can. Then everything was quiet. i went to the doorway and saw him standing before the sink with an open can in his hand."The picture looked just like pears," he mumbled. He walked out and sat on the back steps and I knew he had been embarrassed before his son. The can read 'Whole White Potatoes'.

adapted from My Father's Hands by Calvin Worthington