My Poor Finger

I’m not sure you know, or care to know how I handle my Saturday posts. Those conversations at the bar, they take a while to write. The more or less normal posts, like “Hand Crafted” are also planned pretty far in advance. When I don’t have something in the on-deck circle, I turn to Linda and her SoCS prompt. Before I get to Linda, I have to acknowledge my readers in other countries and my readers in this country that don’t follow baseball. I was reminded this week in some comments, that some of my phrases are uniquely American. I’ve used “on-deck circle” before, and I’ve received questions. In baseball, the batter in the on-deck circle is the next batter up. After the guy standing at the plate taking pitches.

So, why not just say “when I don’t have a post ready”? Well, I could do that, but Linda says that SoCS posts shouldn’t be edited. They should be, you know, a stream of consciousness, so you, the poor reader, have to follow the blabbering voices in my head, and they chose on-deck circle.

Back to Linda. So, here I was, comfortably working for a living, secure in the thought that at some point on Friday, Linda would deliver the Friday SoCS prompt. Then this happened:

“Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is: “finger.”  Use it any way you’d like. Have fun!”

Really? Finger? Linda, I just have to ask…On second thought, I’m not going to ask. This is one of those words that can go too many places, and not many of them are all that good.

Fortunately for me, I have a finger with a history and, if my finger could talk, it would say: “How about turning that spotlight on me?”

The finger under the lamp? My left index finger. This poor guy has suffered mightily playing second fiddle to his counterpart on the right hand. It’s easy to understand, I’m right-handed. My left hand holds things. My right hand swings the hammer, pulls the knife and holds the torch. My left hand guides things. My right hand pushes the board through the tool. I’m not sure why this particular finger is my favorite target, but a brief history of left-index-finger incidents should suffice to convince you that it’s true.

Hammer-Tacker – A hammer-tacker is a stapler that you swing like a hammer. It’s great for tacking up those 10 foot tall continuous strips of Tyvek on a wall under construction. Left hand holds the Tyvek, right hand swings the hammer-tacker. Occasionally, the stapler mechanism doesn’t work properly and the staple is left half in and half out. The engineers who designed this tool knew this would happen. You simply turn the tool over and smack that staple again. I did this a few times every day while residing our house. One time, I missed the staple. I saw the hammer-end of the hammer-tacker covering my left index finger and I saw a circle of blood spurts all around the business end of that tool. I actually had enough time to think “whoa, that – is – gonna – hurt.”

Regular hammer – Yeah, just substitute “nail” for staple and “hammer” for hammer-tacker and you have the image of a series of smacks resulting in blood blisters, split finger nails and blood, always blood.

Utility knife – I am always, always, always, always, very careful with utility knives because they are very, very sharp. But, sometimes, you have to hold a very small thing while you try to make it just a little bit smaller. Sometimes, the thing you make a little smaller is your left-index-finger.

Speaking of smaller, my left-index-finger is smaller than its right-hand brother. That’s not a left-right thing. That’s not a malnutrition thing. No, it’s the result of running the left finger though the spinning blade of my table saw. A very talented young woman in the ER was able to stitch the pieces back together, but there was some material missing.

Utility knife. I’m not sure if it was this one, but several have caused injury.

Hammer

Tyvek

This little gizzmo will help prevent putting my finger in harm’s way again.

This little lady actually works.

Hammer Tacker – one smack, one staple

Watch those fingers.

Right finger is a bit wider.

Yeah, a little bit smaller now.

Smack

My poor finger still works. I can type with it, I can activate the button-thingies on my phone and if we still had a rotary-dial phone, I could dial a phone with it. OK, that’s not true. First, we actually do have a rotary dial phone. It’s a Princess phone and I bought it at an antique store for my wife for Mother’s Day. Yes, I am that romantic. Second, I cannot dial with this finger. Several years after having it reassembled, I can’t stand to apply pressure to the end of this finger. For those of you long-time followers, this is the finger that previously appeared in SoCS in the whipped-blood incident. ‘nuff said.