Hands and gloves

The other day I was sitting by an older lady at church, and Malachi was grabbing her hands and kissing them. (He could tell she was a Grandma, I guess. He liked her.) And then he'd grab my hands and kiss them. So there we all were, sitting there looking at each others' hands: Ky's tiny pink dimple-y ones around my long brown hangnail-y ones and the lady's translucent papery ones. And the lady said to me, "You have such pretty hands. Even when mine were smooth and not old and wrinkled, mine never looked like that." I had been thinking that my hands didn't even look like mine, they looked like they belonged to someone else. And I suddenly had a distinct memory of sitting in church playing with my mom's hands, pushing the veins around, and her saying, "I used to sit and play with my mothers' wrinkled hands, and now look, yours are the young ones, and mine are the ones that are getting old and wrinkled."

And it all made me think of another Leslie Norris poem. Here it is:

Gardening Gloves
by Leslie Norris

Mild, knob-jointed, old,
They lie on the garage floor.
Scarred by the turn of a spade
In hard, agricultural wear
And soiled by seasonal mould
They look like animal skins---
Or imagine a gargoyle's hands.

But not my hands I'd swear,
Being large, rough and uncouth;
Yet the moment I pick them up
They assume an absurd truth,
They assert I have given them shape,
Making my hands the mirror
For their comfortable horror.

And I know if I put them on
I gain a deliberate skill,
And old, slow satisfaction
That is not mine at all
But sent down from other men.
Yes, dead men live again
In my reluctant skin.

I remember my father's hands,
How they moved as mine do now
While he took his jokes from the air
Like precise, comical birds.
These gloves are my proper wear.
We all preserve such lives.
I'm not sorry to have these gloves.

I like the implications here: the way the gloves, the things we inherit from our parents and grandparents, first seem grotesque and foreign to us---but as we take on those traits ourselves, their shape changes---as, simultaneously, does ours---and they can become comfortable and even natural. (For good or bad, really---there are plenty of "parental" things I didn't want to find myself doing someday, that now I do without any embarrassment at all---and other things that I am embarrassed about, but I find myself doing them anyway.)

And I like the way the poem shoves itself somewhat awkwardly into a form (the odd seven-line stanzas, and those unobtrustive, alternating slant rhymes: old/spade/mould, floor/wear, mirror/horror, etc.)---just the way the speaker's hands fit reluctantly, but somehow reassuringly, into the gloves.

And how it captures our own transformations: the things that weigh on us from the past, the things we wish we could discard, the things we finally accept as inevitable, even the things we gradually learn to respect.

Like my Grandma's hands, those wrinkled creases and purpley veins. I know I'll be looking down at those same marks on my own hands someday---I knew that, even back then as I looked at my own mother's---and I know it won't even be long from now---but it's still hard to believe. And yet the thought isn't as alarming to me as it used to be. I guess I have more appreciation for all the things that go with that "knob-jointed" oldness. The deliberateness, the satisfaction, even the slowness sound better to me now. And I think, like this poem says, I'm not sorry to have those things in my future. And in my past.