I can recall countless times of being a child in the car while my dad drove. On vacation, say, creeping along the tabletop of Kansas on I-70, eyes peeled for the purple shadow of the Rockies. Or maybe we were on our way to Safeway to pick up a stack of the frozen Mexican dinners that were a staple in the months just after my mother left. Or we might simply have been going to the pediatrician, slipping through the side streets of Kansas City to avoid traffic. One thing I remember about such drives is my father’s silence. Not an easy, peaceful quiet, but one with jagged edges. A roiling, assertive silence that took up space in the Oldsmobile like an additional passenger. Even as a really little kid, I could sense the storms brewing behind that stoic mask.
The other thing I recall about watching my father drive mile after mile after innumerable, nameless mile—are his hands. Strong, veiny, long-fingered, restless hands. Thumb drumming on the steering wheel, followed repeatedly by fingers fanning out almost gracefully, like a pianist preparing for a solo. My father’s hands were almost a separate animal, a wary creature preparing for whatever opportunity or disaster might arise next. At the wheel, my father was like a lion at rest, ostensibly relaxed but with a twitching tail announcing his readiness to assert control.
For a long time I believed I could avoid most of the pain of life if I were similarly strong, alert, and prepared. If only I trained carefully and remained alert enough, then surely I could sidestep pitfalls, vault neatly over razor-wire topped walls, and learn to play dead til the bombers passed overhead. For me there was some protracted period of innocence—some might call it ignorance or stupidity—when I imagined that if only I were smart, diligent and vigilant enough, then I could manage and manipulate my reality into benign docility. And for decades, the lesson I drew from the fact that it didn’t seem to work was that I was a failure and not that my basic assumption was wrong. You know, that maybe the Buddha was right and that pain was stitched into life itself and couldn’t be outsmarted.
This is my 2024 stab at a Father’s Day essay, but I can’t think about him—gone now for four years—without also thinking about the bigger thing, about what it (maybe) means for me too to be living into dying. And I can’t miss how my living is smeared like the edges of a stain into his. Philosopher-me wants to say that I can still feel the contingency of my being relative to his, stuck there like taffy that stretches and stretches but resists separation. For me to consider those from whose flesh and bones come my own fragile, resilient embodiedness is for me to regard myself. And my own physicality reminds me constantly, and in the most obvious way, of this man whose ropy, restless hands I didn’t just observe but that I inherited.
I don’t know if it makes my fascination with his hands more or less odd when I share that his hands are also mine. And when I explain that I was still a youngster when I recognized this. When I realized that, even though I was a girl, I would never have the fleshier, pretty hands of my mother, with her tapered fingers and perfect half-moon nails. Nope. When I looked at my hands, I could only see his. His hands, I knew, could fix a car and build a kite. They could repair a radio and assemble a Barbie Dream Camper. None of which I have done. But my hands are like his in that they seem to have arrived prewired to tap out a rhythm of readiness, ever prepared for dangers real and imagined.
Just about every time I work with new meditators, I try to explain that I facilitate such groups not because I am especially equanimous but because I am so ordinary. I know what it is to coexist with an anxious mind. When these new meditators bemoan their own inclination to jitter and worry, when they are certain that they are beyond help, I ask them to watch my hands. I am a basically happy person, I say, but keep an eye on my hands. My restless, undomesticated, undisciplined, unspiritual hands. I hold them up, scarred and aging and in motion. These are my father’s hands, I say, and I love them. Because they constantly remind me both of him and that there is no need to be ashamed of the restless human/animal that I have been born to be.
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