Windows to my Soul

/ Jeff Cann

At my 8th grade lunch table, we compared hands, budding palm readers, one and all. Marcus Pappas blurted out “Cann’s and mine look like old lady hands.”  He had a point—thin and boney—but it irked me that he said this out loud. Marcus died thirty-five years ago while still good looking, except, I suppose, his hands. My hands resemble weathered saddle bags, scarred and spotted with tea stains. Still thin and boney, add wrinkly now too. Veins squiggle beneath the surface like caffeinated worms.

I last saw Marcus at Tilden pool in the mid-eighties. My neighborhood had two pools with competing vibes. To me, Tilden seemed the more laid-back pool. And, it had a swim team. Tilden pool attracted the athletic families. The other pool, Old Farm, is where the rich kids went to bask in the sun. My family wasn’t wealthy, but we weren’t athletic either.

Tilden threw annual parties on the Fourth of July. Beers, burgers, a greased watermelon in the center of the pool for the teenage boys to fight over. My high school friend Drew invited me as a guest one year. Drew’s family were Swimmers—note the capital “S.” When he teamed up with my brother and me on a triathlon relay team, Drew’s leg was the ocean swim. Tilden families! His older brother coaches swimming to this day.

We were just out of college, still living at home. Drew guarded at the pool on weekends, and I settled into the job I loathed for the next ten years. Marcus showed up at the party. His feet were messed up, misshapen, apparent through his heavy black boots. He walked using metal crutches with forearm cuffs. Dark glasses shielded his unseeing eyes. He roughhoused with his service dog on a grassy hill, the two of them smiling, juking, and rolling around. Much of the crowd looked on. My vocabulary still underdeveloped, I didn’t yet know the word, but I understood performative when I saw it. Marcus wore a goatee, and his wavy hair flipped up at the bottom of his ears. A beautiful boy at the end of his life. 

~

In my first weeks of college, I looked to qualify the growing internal ill-ease that washed over me. I charred my knuckles on my desk lamp’s molten metal shade. I sparred with a fire alarm box, punching out the safety glass. I plucked the shards from under my skin to hide the evidence of my crime. I held the glowing ember of a lit cigarette against the back of my hand in a deserted minor league ball park. My friend O looked on, his expression inscrutable. Thanksgiving break, my mother clenched my scabbed hands and tried to read my mind.

~

In the final weeks of my junior year, I punched an oak tree leaving my knuckles rough and swollen. I sneaked out of a mixer early, too self-conscious to talk or dance with my date, I abandoned her for the night. I craved destruction. Not the tree, though, it was four feet wide. A week later, a different tree, a twin, a couple dozen yards away, crashed to the ground on a sunny afternoon. Across campus, drinking beer on the lawn, we looked to the heavens and wondered about thunder from a blue sky. Had I punched that tree, I could have claimed victory when it fell. I couldn’t untwist the cap from a plastic Pepsi bottle for years. Arthritis flares when I make a fist.

~

My wife Susan spotted a porch glider as we drove past a junk shop. The aluminum frame seemed sound, but the wooden seats rotted through, the hardware fused with rust. We crammed it in the back of our Subaru on a fifteen-dollar investment. Susan took the kids to Storytime at the library while I took a reciprocating saw to the glider, cutting off the useless parts. Dripping with sweat as I hacked away at rotten wood and rusted metal, my hand slipped into the oscillating blade, slicing off an unnecessary chunk from the end of my index finger.  

Assessing the damage under a running faucet, I could see the wound wasn’t stitchable, and it didn’t seem to impact the function of my finger, just the shape. I wrapped it in paper towels and focused on dismantling the glider before Susan and our kids got home.  

~

The skin surrounding my right thumb is numb from the joint in the center of my hand to its very tip. It’s a bizarre lingering result of a dramatic over-the-handlebars mountain bike crash. In the time since, my dislocated shoulder has hurt and slowly healed, but my tingly thumb never improved. It’s annoying and it causes me to drop stuff. The surgeon says he can’t fix it, and he says no, it won’t get better with time. As an ironic insult, despite the surface numbness, I’m often left with shooting pains deep inside after I grip something for an extended period of time.

William Shakespeare popularized the saying the eyes are the window to the soul.   That might be true for him, but for me, apparently, it’s my hands. They tell my story, draw a map of my past—a lifetime of dis-ease, recklessness and bad luck. Of course, it would be nice if my hands weren’t so chewed up, achy and numb, but wishing for that is wishing against the person I am today. We are the sum of our triumphs and mistakes.

Inspired by: https://georgiakreiger.com/2025/07/07/hands/

Image courtesy of kstudio on Freepik

24 thoughts on “Windows to my Soul”

  2. A great description of your hands in the opening, and a wonderful concluding paragraph. Some tough and some entertaining reading in between.
    Thanks Jeff.
    Be well and do good,
    DD

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  3. “a lifetime of dis-ease, recklessness and bad luck.” That’s poetic gold. This whole post read like a poet’s confession to a life lived under the scrutiny of one’s own memories. It’s always those sore things I remember that stings the most for me. I enjoyed the trip down memory lane through your eyes … I even felt your pain, I winced a time or two. Thanks for sharing.

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  4. Vivid. Is this memoir or fiction?

    I was wondering, as clarifying questions (and not that you should feel like you should answer me), what happened that had blinded Marcus and made him so beat-up? And what was it that the protagonist saw as performative?

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    • This is memoir. Marcus had diabetes. We stopped hanging out by high school so I don’t know why he went downhill so quickly. Performative – literally, it seemed like he was performing for the crowd as if to say no, no, my life is great. Do people write fiction like this? I suppose they do.

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      • Yes – and I think you post a fictional short story sometimes, don’t you? Sorry if I’m remembering wrongly. I think this reads like a pretty good short story, so I was kind of offering feedback from a perspective of fleshing it out as such.

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        • Right, on occasion, I write fiction, but it’s usually clear that it’s fiction. One time I wrote a short story that seemed exactly like memoir. I identified it as fiction at the end, and I asked readers if they felt like they just wasted their time. I remember feeling ripped off when I found out the notebook wasn’t a memoir.

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  5. It is strange that the “stuff” one survives forms the steel in a person’s backbone—and forms who we become. I applaud you for writing such a powerful post about your life. And people who have baby-soft hands have probably never really lived.

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  7. A lovely essay, with parts of it hitting the heart hard.

    I recognize that desire to strike out, wound, and cause damage, mostly to ourselves and hapless inanimate objects. How desperate we become to have our pain seen and acknowledged.

    I’ve now been on both sides – the sufferer and the parent – and, I admit it: I didn’t fully understand how much my behaviour hurt my parents. Your mother must’ve felt so helpless. Not being able to fix things for our kids is awful.

    Things out of our control are the worst, followed closely, of course, by cigarette burns. Those things fester.

    What an interesting idea, to examine a part of ourselves and think about the story it tells. Our hands say so much.

    I hope the glider turned out well. I always wanted a porch swing.

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    • I’m happy to say, 20 years on, the glider is still in use and works well. Unfortunately mosquitos keep it lightly used most of the summer. At the bottom of my post, I linked the post that gave me the idea to write this. Georgia is a fantastic writer and as a college level writing professor a great person to get feedback from. I recommend her blog. Sadly, my most beat up body part is my brain, and most of that was just bad luck. But I’ve written about that a hundred times.

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  8. Pingback: Hands, Revisited – Person on the Page

  9. « Merci, Jeff, pour ce texte à la fois poignant et profondément honnête. Vous transformez des cicatrices et des imperfections en véritables fenêtres sur votre âme — une invitation très touchante à une forme de paix avec soi-même. Vos mains, marquées par les années, par la douleur comme par l’amour, reflètent ce que nous sommes : notre histoire incarnée. Une belle leçon d’acceptation et de résilience. 🙏🏼 »

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