Later that same day, as the snow continued to fall, I buried some more of my mother's ashes in a small hole I had dug in the ivy-covered mound humped over my father's grave in a cramped Brooklyn cemetery filled with leaning snow-topped headstones. In the profound silence of the empty cemetery, the snow quickly covered the small grave that her ashes rested in, over the larger mound of my father's casket. As I watched, kneeling, head bowed, the snow fell silently, covering everything with its soft blanket.
Back in California, I spread some more of my mother's ashes on the naked stone lip of San Jacinto Mountain, towering ten thousand feet over Palm Springs, where she had lived with me, with occasional pleasure and much resignation, the last six years of her life. In those final years, when our respective roles had been completely reversed, I now the parent, she the child, I came to know my mother, and through her, my childhood, as I never had before. And I recalled the lines of T. S. Eliot: “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”
Finally, in Santa Monica, where my wife and I also have a home (and my mother often visited before she became ill), I spread my mother's ashes in an imaginary line beginning at the base of a solitary cluster of palm trees leaning into each other, which seemed to me to resemble my tight-knit, insular family. The thin trail of ashes continued across the sands of a California beach and ended in the ocean, where I submerged myself in the tumbling surf, letting the sea reclaim from my cupped hand the last few grains.
Now, from the bluff at the foot of my street, a hundred feet above the bustling daily traffic on the Pacific Coast Highway, where no doubt the drivers think of the Dow and not of death, I have an unbroken line of sight over the indwelling palm trees, across the corrugated sand, and into the timeless ocean. From the shoreline, my gaze travels on the broad blue back of the ocean to the blue-gray horizon that bleeds into the gray-blue sky.
Epilouge
There are times, when the house is sleeping, when I remember the smell of my father's body. It is a mixture of many odors, a brisk hint of Old Spice blended with his mug shaving soap, Vitalis, and the sharp odor of the Lava soap he used every night with a stiff brush to clean off the printer's grime that had accumulated under his nails and in the creases of his strong hands.
As a boy, I would sit on the closed toilet seat and watch in fascination as my father scoured his hands until they were pink and fresh.
“My voice is in my hands,” he said. “Dirty hands do not speak clearly and with beauty. My hands must be clean, must always be clean.”
My father would carefully dry his hands, one strong finger at a time, and then would look down at me with a soft look in his eyes. And his eloquent hands would come to life shaping the air with his perfect love for me.
While I remember, my hands awaken and, independent of me, begin to talk to my father. And as the mists of memory part, I clearly see the hands of my father signing back to me.
* * *
Many years after the death of my father, when I had the passing thought that I could be an artist, I was studying a book on how to draw the human figure. In the introduction the author extolled the human form as a thing of beauty and infinite complexity, celebrated throughout history by poets and lovers, analyzed and dissected by doctors and architects.
The book then proceeded apace, from a study of The Eyes, The Ears, The Nose, The Mouth, and from there downward.
Eventually, I turned a page, and there was: The Hands.
Displayed on the following pages were marvelous, deceptively simple, pencil line drawings of the human hand in motion.
The accompanying description of the topic began with the sentence “Hands speak a rich language.”
Unbidden, my eyes filmed over, and I put down my pencil, and cried.
About the Author
MYRON UHLBERG is the critically acclaimed and award-winning author of a number of children's books. He lives with his wife in Santa Monica and Palm Springs, California.
HANDS OF MY FATHER A Bantam Book / February 2009
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2008 by Myron Uhlberg
Bantam Books is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.,
and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Uhlberg, Myron.
Hands of my father: a hearing boy, his deaf parents, and the language
of love / Myron Uhlberg.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-553-90627-1
1. Uhlberg, Myron. 2. Children of deaf parents—United States—Biography.
3. Deaf parents—United States—Biography. 4. Deaf—Family relationships—
United States—Case studies. I. Title.
HQ759.912U45 2009
306.874092—dc22
[B]2008025628
www.bantamdell.com
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