This is a handwritten story about my hands.
Since today’s WordPress Discover prompt is “hands,” I thought now would be a good time to share it.
Chances are I’ll never win an award for penmanship so if you can’t read the chicken scratch in the pictures, there’s a transcript after the jump.
This is a story about a pair of hands.
They’re my hands, and this is not their best story.
I’ve gotten a little ahead of myself.
There’s something you should know about my hands before we get any further into this story.
My hands don’t work.
Well, that’s a little dramatic. They work. They just don’t work well.
The right one works about as well as you can hope when you have Cerebral Palsy.
It’s got a pretty good grip for handshakes, and it’s held me up on more than one occasion since I began to walk with a cane.
The left hand is a different story.
It’s weak, doesn’t grip well and it won’t turn over.
It’s basically the reason I didn’t stick with piano lessons in the third grade, although now I wish I would’ve, but that’s another story for another day.
This story is set in one of the most well-known metropolises in America, New York City.
It was last summer, and you should know before our group got to the Big Apple we’d walked all over Washington D.C.
We had a fun trip, and we’d checked a few things off of our list in NYC when my right hand gave out.
It just quit, right in the middle of a New York City sidewalk. I made it move just enough so I could barely hold on to my cane while I found a place to stop.
I couldn’t grip at all, and I had no strength in my fingers.
We made it to the American Museum of Natural History. I sat down to enjoy a bottle of Diet Coke, and everybody else discovered I had a problem.
I grabbed the bottle cap, and I couldn’t open it. I couldn’t even make it move.
It was not my finest hour.
We walked to Central Park and spent a few minutes there before the rain started to fall harder.
We realized we’d better make a break for Broadway if we were going to make our show time.
I’ll admit, I was a little bit worried about my hand by the time we ducked into a Broadway Burger King to eat and use the bathroom.
I didn’t tuck my shirt back in, and I made up my mind to tell everybody it was because I couldn’t.
I’ll tell you that was a little bit of a lie.
We walked down Broadway in the rain, and I looked like a drowned rat by the time we made it to the Gershwin Theatre to see “Wicked.”
It was there the truth came out about why my shirt tail wasn’t in, and it was there everybody learned yours truly walked all of Broadway with unbuttoned pants.
I walked a grand total of 48.9 miles on our trip.
It took a few more weeks and a few more times I had to let somebody else open my Coke before my hand returned to normal, but it did.
I guess I told you all of that to tell you sometimes scary situations make for funny stories, and you should never take for granted the ability to button your pants.
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