In His Hands

My father’s hands were hard and calloused. They were the strong hands of a mechanic. I remember that, even though I watched him scrub hard after his day’s work, they never seemed clean from so many years of working in oil and grease. He’d use gasoline and wipe them dry with a shop rag. Then he’d use a soft, creamy white soap scooped from a dirty container with a plastic lid. Like the gasoline, it had its own aroma. When I smell it today, I see it again oozing between his fingers.

Those wonderful hands and his heart comforted me often. As I grew older, I never grew tired of shaking his hands and feeling their strength and security.

I grew up across the road from the garage and spent most of my young life there, seeing him in good times and in bad.  The garage gave me many good memories. He’d laugh and joke with the many men who flowed in and out. They’d lean on car fenders, toss wrenches in the air, and tell funny stories about each other. They’d laugh so hard they would bend over and howl. It was great to see them acting like children. I can still hear the booming voice of Reverend Girard when he came in and how strange it was to see him looking like the others rather than the man in a black robe behind the pulpit leading us in solemn prayer. He laughed and joked like everyone else. Those experiences were so refreshing and life-revealing for a young boy.

Even though he’d sometimes murmur to me that he wished some of his customers and visitors would go so that he could get something done, Dad would never ignore anyone. From the woman who didn’t know where the gasoline went in her car to friends who had grown old and just needed someone to talk to, Dad was always there. Seeing other people with Dad, I learned that he was much more than just a father for me. I had to share his compassion with other people.

In those years before I left home, I always kissed his forehead good night. Many times he was already asleep in the easy chair, his bony feet propped up and his pipe dying down in the ashtray by an empty bowl of ice cream. He seemed to automatically wake up when the TV’s eleven o’clock news was over. I made it a point to tell him often that I loved him, but it seems that I never hugged him enough.

My daughter, Kari, was born in Illinois while I attended graduate school. My wife, Linda, and I knew without a doubt that we had to return home after her birth so that we could be near our families. We left Illinois to return to Ohio two weeks after Kari’s birth, trusting God for everything because we had nothing. We lived in a small home connected to my shop where my Grandma Opal once lived. The days of Dad’s daily visits with Kari are still fresh and wonderful in my memory. That was some forty years ago, but I can still see him bending out from under the hood of a car to give little Kari his daily kiss.