Mother’s Hands
My mother was good with rubber bands. She could snap one around any shape or size with long deft fingers as if it were a deliberate dance, punctuated by the final pop. She was equally good with money. Having worked as a teller she could count bills with speed, creating a unique feathery sound which never wavered in tempo. She could slide coins off a smooth tabletop, scraping them toward her, two by two, counting each pair with a persistent rhythm while dangling a cigarette from her mouth and talking about something else. The daughter of a rural accountant who kept books for farmers and other local businesses, she was an old hand with an adding machine as well. I think she enjoyed playing it like a piano, also a favorite activity of her hands. On the piano, she played a little classical and a little ragtime, but what she really loved was blues, the “dirty blues,” she was fond of emphasizing.
Our family’s hands were long and narrow with strong, pronounced thumbs and knuckles. It was a family trait and most pairs of these hands played piano, at least a little. My grandpa was the grand master of organ and piano, so family gatherings were filled with music and rhythm at his hand. Others competed for a turn at the keys and everyone got their chance, but his flourishes could almost make you cry.
One of the most unusual forms of family music was in April every year (although I’m not sure anyone else would remember it as music). We kids would travel to our grandparents’ house at tax time where we stayed until the accounting was done. Late into the night, I could hear Mother and Grandpa in his home office, going through the many boxes of loose receipts that local farmers had brought in throughout the day.
Grandpa would call out numbers while Mother punched them rapidly into the adding machine, a glass of scotch by her side. After a while they would switch roles. They were so fast that the voice would announce new numbers while previous numbers were still being entered into the machine. This had the effect of a continuous stream of sound with neither the voice nor the adding machine ever pausing. One of the best parts was the intermittent bell-sound of the sum bar which went something like: ka-ching! This punctuation joined the endless stream and never a beat was missed. I loved hearing the melody of the voice carried by the machine’s percussion, sounding like: chicka-chicka, chicka-chicka, chicka-chic-kaching! On into the night they would work, through our bedtime, filling the air with rhythm and voice and numbers to beat a deadline we kids learned to respect. Tax time was all hands on deck. But, for me, my mother’s hands were the star of the show. I thought they could do just about anything.