Graf #1

My right palm has a dark blue dot lurking just below the surface, at times looking like it is sinking deeper towards the bones, and at times looking as if it will erupt and land in my eye, where it once was headed if my right palm hadn’t followed orders and stopped the pencil-wielding jilted thirteen year old.  Given the various solvents and abrasives used over the years, combined with almost fifty years of grabbing things without protection my hands are lucky to be here.  They wear their badges on a tapestry of wrinkles and bulging veins, too old to belong to me, I must be looking at a balled up piece of wax paper that was on the pie plate too long.  The two interior fingers of my left hand are decorated with rings that will never wrinkle when they age, never lose their strength, but also will forever bear witness to lost skirmishes with equally hardened objects.  There are white raised bumps and ridges traversing the backs of my hands like an early street map of Boston and its cow paths, reminders that although flesh heals, it never lets us forget.  As if in league with my dermis, my knuckles sometimes act like frozen hydraulics, forcing me to remind myself of the “somewhere down the line “lectures given by the trainers when I played hockey and football.  Because these lessons are not just for me the knuckles have taken on comical proportion, looking like Gollum on a good day.  The girl who caused the blue dot?  She’s in Vermont now, a state that allows same-sex marriage.  I guess my hands have become a permanent record of sorts, a minor monument to my stupidity and brashness, but I still have ten digits!