Mind the Devil’s Playthings

What have you been doing with your hands lately?

Using them to feed yourself, obviously. Probably tying your shoes and pointing at things. Maybe braiding hair or strumming a guitar. Hopefully washing them well and often.

Honestly, it’s none of my business. I don’t really want to know, especially if it involves something sharp or wet. It’s just that I’ve been thinking about hands a lot lately as I watch mine tippity-tap-tapping on alphabet buttons and picking sandspurs out of the dog’s nose.

They’re really quite amazing, these evolved appendages of ours. Particularly our opposable thumbs, which vaulted our big-brained monkey ancestors into our current status as the planet’s dominant species.

But like our assumed superior intelligence, we should not take our hands for granted. Indeed, a tourist on vacation in the Caribbean managed to prove both of those true last week when hers were bitten off while attempting to take a selfie with a shark.

Our hands can hardly ever be found idle anymore, thanks to our multifunctional magic boxes that allow us to read, work, shop, play games, initiate and return correspondence, research any topic exhaustively but not necessarily effectively, even to *ahem* satisfy certain urges, unless you live in Texas, Nebraska and 17 other states.

We used to warn ourselves to keep them busy, lest they gravitate towards mischief, intrusive thoughts, or worse. These days we do so much with our manual extremities that we give ourselves painful syndromes. Twiddling one's thumbs once meant wasting time; now it is a literal yoga practice.

There’s always jazz hands, but you can’t do that all the time

Thanks to my inability to disengage my thumbs from the train wrecks (and plane crashes) hurling across the screen this week, my phone informed me yesterday that my usage of it was up to almost seven hours a day. We may conflate technology with progress, but this does not seem to be the type of metacarpal activity that helped our forebears achieve agricultural advancement or draw masterpieces on cave walls or discover new ways to tie knots. It certainly isn’t doing anything for my mental health.

It occurs to me that even though I certainly keep them busy, I have not been using my hands to their full potential (other than an occasional flashing a well-deserved middle finger.) While Instagram brims with all sorts of creative tutorials about learning the accordion and fashioning twee houses for pet spiders, watching them doesn’t count.

I can’t blame the phone entirely. I used to have all sorts of finger-employing hobbies, like journaling and knitting and gluing things to my minivan’s dashboard (may its memory be a blessing.) But after a while writing became work and all my hats were lopsided and the van finally died. It just became habitual to use my thumbs to tap out an easy dopamine snack rather than find something else to do.

So it’s really my own self-defeatism and laziness that’s cramped my hands’ style. But lest they disappear into a predator’s mouth or crumple up from congenital arthritis, I’ve committed lately to finding new endeavors for my miraculous mitts. Here are some of them:

Morning pages. I was introduced to the practice of handwriting three pages first thing upon waking 30 years ago by writer Julia Cameron in her phenomenal book The Artist’s Way. She frames it as a way to purge the superfluous nonsense that impedes creativity; I prefer the term “dream vomit.” Letting words loose by hand on paper engages a part of my mind I forgot I had, even if my penmanship has devolved to the point that they appear to be scribbled with my feet. It also gives me a reason to use the gorgeous fountain pen gifted to me by the multiverse that is Rubi McGrory, who would crochet the devil into a sparkly cocoon if he ever tried to find her hands inert.

Scrabble. Something about the quarter-fold board and clack of the tiles gets me giddy. There’s a certain sensuality to feeling my fingers in the grooves of the letters, though spending too much time picking them out of the bag veers into molestation territory. No phones allowed except to verify an official word—and enforce the three minute timer for those family members who spend too much time calculating out the point value of each move. I tend to pay more attention to wordplay than strategy, which is why Mark beats me nine times out of ten.

Making music. Our living room has gotten loud lately as my favorite resident rock star continues to add to his canon of original songs, backed up by a horn section of one. I played passable French horn through high school and acquired a beat-up trumpet from a pawn shop in the 90s but never worked up enough nerve to join a ska band. Thirty years later I’m still pretty much at a sixth grade level and just as self-conscious, though that’s never stopped me from bleating with the Sweet Thunder Strolling Band—we’ll be stepping out at Flannery O’Connor’s 100th Birthday Party Celebration around Lafayette Square on March 23. Let me know if anyone wants to start a middle school orchestra.

Needlepoint. I know I’m not the only one feeling stabby. Savannah Needlepoint provides socially acceptable alleviation of such urges with needles of various sizes, a rainbow of textured threads, and an array of ready-made canvases from decorative to satisfyingly snarky. Owner Suzanne Smallwood opened her bright, spacious Sandfly shop in November to grow the craft’s local coterie and bring new acolytes into the fold, and needlepoint devotee Lisa Muller offers beginner classes and encouragement around the community table. They’ve been surprised at how many younger folks have joined the stitch scene—it’s not just us olds looking for production alternatives to tapping on our phones. I’m still poking around with a simple basket weave but hope to graduate to a Stitch Tac Go sampler soon; much prettier than what can be accomplished with a machete.

Camellia thieving. ‘Tis the season to pluck and purloin, and all these glorious japonicas and sasanquas won’t last long. But I’m not saying my favorite winter way to use my hands isn’t a little satanic, as I am clearly possessed. I’ll be discussing my horticultural demons and signing books at the Cohen’s Retreat Camellia Festival this Saturday afternoon Feb. 22—looking forward to communing with my fellow blossom bandits! Of course, there will be a review of the Camellia Thief Code of Conduct.

You’ve now reached the end of this missive, thanks to your magnificent opposable thumbs. I hope whatever else you do with your hands today brings you serenity and satisfaction (again, none of my business!)

We’ve come a long way as a species since we made tools from stone, though it doesn’t seem like our big brains and agile appendages have helped humanity become any less diabolical. They’re still the finest evolution has to offer though.

Maybe one day we’ll use them to beat those swords to plowshares after all.

Keep ‘em where I can see ‘em ~ JLL