I have a tie with a Windsor knot made on my neck by my father's hands. He stood behind me and I watched his hands, trying to memorize the path of the fabric. Now all I remember are his aged hands, which my hands are beginning to resemble.
My father’s hands: a child’s hands that carried his dead dog to bury in a lot before his mother came home so she wouldn’t see what he saw; a young man’s hands that carried my sister when she was an infant, blue with an undiagnosed disease, out of the hospital that had given up on her, into the car and to another hospital where her life was saved; hands that lovingly touched my mother; hands that never struck me in anger; hands that delivered milk, bread, and laundry through storms and illness; hands that were called upon to throw dirt on my mother's casket way way too soon; his hand on the kitchen table, near the end, as if he is about to throw the dice for the last time.
Hands that steadied me as I posed on a pony in Brooklyn: I looked at that photograph dozens of times before noticing him crouching behind me, the way he would, decades later, tying the Windsor knot.
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