A story to share

2 tests down, 1 more tomorrow… I wonder why I am spending a fortune and draining my brain cells to earn myself a cert, while people will eventually judge me with it! Now I understand.

I was arranging my files just now and I found this short story. It is one of the many short stories that were handed over to me during the grammar course conducted by some educational consultant back in sec sch. As I was reading through it, sadness extended over me; it is something worth reading so I decided to post it. I realize how important it is to be literate today and I am glad I could read and write. The title of the story is “My Father’s Hands”

Here it goes:

His hands were rough and exceedingly strong. He could gently prune a fruit-tree or firmly wrestle a stubborn mule into harness. But what I remember most is the special warmth from those hands soaking through my shirt as he would take me by the shoulder and, squatting beside my ear, pointing out the glittering swoop of a blue hawk, or a rabbit asleep in its lair. They were good hands that served him well and failed in only one thing: they never learnt to write.

My father was illiterate. The number of illiterates in the country has steadily declined, but if there were only one I would be saddened, remembering my father and the pain he endured because his hands never learnt to write.

When he started school, the remedy for a wrong answer was ten ruler strokes across a stretched palm. For some reason, shapes, figures and recitation just didn’t fall into the right pattern inside his six-year-old head. Maybe he suffered from some type of learning handicap such as dyslexia. His father took him out of school after several months and set him to a man’s job on the farm.

Years later, his wife, educated to the fourth year of primary school, would try to teach him to read. And still later I would grasp his big fist between my small hands and awkwardly help him trace the letters of his name. He submitted to the ordeal, but soon grew restless. Flexing his fingers and kneading his palms, he would eventually declare that he had had enough and would depart for a long, solitary walk.

Finally, one night when he thought no one saw, he slipped away with his son’s second-grade reader and laboured over the words, until they became too difficult. He pressed his forehead into the pages and wept. ‘Not even a child’s book?’ Thereafter, no amount of persuading could bring him to sit with pen and paper.

From the farm to road-building and later factory work, his hands served him well. His mind was keen, his will to work unsurpassed. During World War II, he was a pipefitter in a shipyard and installed the complicated guts of mighty fighting ships.

His enthusiasm and efficiency brought an offer to become a foreman – until he was handed the qualification test. His fingers could trace a path across the blueprints while his mind imagined the pipes lacing through the heart of the ship. He could recall every twist and turn of those pipes. But he couldn’t read or write.

After the shipyard closed, he went to the cotton mill, where he laboured at night, and stole for his sleeping hours the time required to run the farm. When the mill shut down, he went out each morning looking for work – only to return night after night and say to Mother as she prepared his dinner, ‘They just don’t want anybody for the job who can’t take their tests.’ It had always been hard for him to stand before a man and make an X mark for his name, but the hardest moment of all was when he placed ‘his mark’ by the name someone else had written for him, and saw another man walking away with the deed to his beloved farm.

Eventually, he found another cotton-mill job, and we moved into a millhouse village with a hundred look-alike houses. He never quite adjusted to town life. The blue of his eyes faded; the skin across his cheekbones became a little slack. But his hands kept their strength, and their warmth still soaked through when he would sit me on his lap and ask that I read to him from the Bible. He took great pride in my reading and would listen for hours as I struggled through the awkward phrases.

Years later, when mum died, I tried to get him to come live with my family, but he insisted on staying in his small house. His health was failing, and he was in and out of hospital with several mild heart attacks.

My last fond memory of Dad was watching as he walked across the brow of a hillside meadow, with those big, warm hands, now gnarled with age, resting on the shoulders of my two children. He stopped to point out to them, confidentially, a pond where he and I had swum and fished years before.

Three weeks later, he was dead of a heart attack. Doc Green was shocked as he had just prescribed a new pill that should kept Dad going till he summoned help. An hour before the chapel service, I found myself standing in Dad’s garden where a neighbour had found him. In the grief, I stopped to trace my fingers in the earth where a great man had reached the end of his life. My eyes caught sight of a soft plastic bottle on the ground. As I held the bottle of pills in my hand, I could picture Dad in his last desperate moments struggling to remove the cap. With anguish I realized why those big warm hands lost in their struggle with death. For there, imprinted on the bottle cap, were the words, ‘Child-proof Cap – Push Down and Twist to Unlock.’

The End

Appreciate the reasons for studying, as not everyone in this world is so fortunate to have a place in school!! Stop complaining that you have no time to study. If that is so, you shouldn’t have the time to read this at all!
Now, I shall go and prepare for the quiz tomorrow. =)