A granddaughter gave me a hand today. Oh, I don’t mean applause, which I wasn’t looking for anyway.But I also wasn’t looking for a Christmas present that would shoot me back to Mrs. Findley’s kindergarten back in the 20th century.
Technically, Amelia didn’t give me the hand, although she can make some mean paddy cakes at the age of 5 months. Rather, the granddaughter's mom, my daughter Annie, gave me Amelia's hand. Not her hand, really, but the impression of the tyke’s paw.
BAM! It time-traveled me immediately to Mrs. Findley’s classroom in the bowels of a public school on the northeast edge of Nebraska in the mid-’50s. It was before the nuke scares set in, so there were no desks to hide under when the inevitable attack came from the Commies.
Actually, we didn’t have desks, anyway. After all, it was kindergarten; as memory serves, we had tables, and, of course, nap mats.
Come Mother’s Day, Mrs. Findley set us about one of the time-honored traditions: making our hand imprints in clay. Of course, I couldn’t make one for my mom, because she had died when I was 2 (that always made Mother’s Day presents awkward), so I made one for my grandmother, with whom we lived.
So you can imagine how Amelia’s hand stirred my memory banks.
But more importantly, it ka-POWED me with an idea for an invention. I don’t know why nobody has thought of it before, but I stand to make a bazillion dollars.
I’m going to form a company to make kits so grandparents can make plaster casts of their hands for posterity. After all, the point of the kindergarten hands is so we can remember the kids after they are grown, until the time we forget whoinHELL they are as they change our diapers.
And the point of grandparent hand casts will be so the grandkids can remember us when we’re gone. Dead. Caput. Pushing up daisies. Turning to dust so future generations will have something to make clay out of so they can make handcasts.
It’s a marvel to see how teensy-tiny Amelia’s hand is, about as wide from thumb tip to pinkie tip as my pointer finger. Some day, we’ll sit around telling her how small her hands were, and what a miracle it is that she’s grown.
“See how SMALL your hands were,” we’ll say.
Considering the day we’re celebrating, that prompts me to acknowledge Somebody who started out soooooooooooooo small that his hands was as tiny as Amelia’s are now. And before it was all over, the child reached the point where He holds the whole world in his hands. Amazing, eh?
As for those of us who haven’t been around since the beginning of time, some day, when I reach the end of my time, and I’m gone, the grandkids will sit around and look at my handprint and say with amazement: “JEEZ, Papa Mike’s hands were SMALL.”
Because they are, my hands, small. Girlie, in fact (no offense to girls).
I suspect that my hand size is one reason I never became a basketball star everybody might have called just Mike. I coulda been been a contenda so good I’d have needed just the one name, like Michael. But I prefer the shortened version because the nuns insisted I use Michael; kind of a rebellion once I slipped the surly bonds of Catholic school.
Alas, basketball stardom was not to be, although there was one time, the game when I was the hero who won the contest with brilliant play and two last-second free throws that won the game by 1 point. But I don’t want to brag, so I won’t go into the time I beat the Indians (no offense to Native Americans, either, as the team really was made up of Indians back in my native Nebraska) and my teammates carried me off the floor on their shoulders.
I figure I can sell the kits on TV, between the “Clap Hands for lights commercials” and the “I’ve fallen down and I can’t get up” come-ons.
Genius, eh? The closest thing to my invention would be the cement boots mobsters use when they send people to swim with the fishes. Even if they have patented that process, I’m sure patent’s still open for grandparent hands, which I think I’ll call GrandHands.
Like I said, I’ll make a bazillion bucks, because everybody would want to buy one — if not grandparents, then their own children, to preserve their heritage for their kids.
Well, everybody would buy one except me. I have this thing, you see, that I don’t like to get my hands dirty unless absolutely necessary. Oh, I’ve done my share of planting in the dirt and even concrete mixing, but I don’t like it (don’t even like to go barefoot on the beach because I don’t like sand in my shoes).
I've got enough Monk in me not to want to encrust my hands in plaster. I'd have to use more wipes than a theater full of wimmin watching "Beaches" would use sheets of cleenex (or ONE guy watching "Brian's Song").
Nope, I wouldn’t do it for anybody or anything. Not nobody, nohow. Not even for history. But maybe, just maybe, for grandkids.
We’ll see. Keep an eye out for GrandHands, on a late-night TV commercial near you. (Maybe I’ll call ’em GrandHands-WOW, and affiliate with Sham-WOW.)
Have a great Christmas weekend and peaceful and joyful New Year.
And enjoy my Christmas collage.
Two babies from two families, Allison and Amelia.
Brendan and Erica and the Bun in the Oven. (In first photo, Erica's on the left, and Brendan's on the right, clowning around. Or is it vice versa?)
The Four Horsemen (gotta LOVE that shot with the wifebeater shirts, no?)
Anthony, the stud muffin football star.
Annie in her first life, clowning around backstage as drama queen in high school.
Allison and Gammon
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