Two Contradictory Ideas

For many years, decades actually, I held in my mind two contradictory notions about my father. First, that he had never gotten beyond the eighth grade. And second, that he had played on the Wichita East High School golf team. One would think that a mind as sharp as mine would have struck upon this paradox long before his death, but the revelation of my obliviousness didn’t strike me until I was sitting with my mother in the office of the mortician, answering questions about my father’s life. “Wait a minute” – I thought to myself as my mother answered the question of how far he had gone in education with “high school” – “I’ve always believed he never got beyond eighth grade.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald quotingly said that “the true test of a first-rate mind is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time.” I don’t think he had my mind in mind at the time. But then he probably was talking more about abstract ideas than facts. It’s one thing to believe that there exists intelligent life elsewhere in the universe (based on theory), while also doubting that it does (based on lack of empirical evidence). It’s another thing to believe that one’s father never got beyond the eighth grade (figment), while also believing he played high school golf (fact). But the mind is a curious thing, and it’s just as likely – perhaps more likely – to hold the latter as it is to hold the former. Sadly, there just aren’t that many Fitzgeraldian first-rate minds. Certainly you aren’t reading one of them now.

My Aging Hands

One of the more visible signs of my aging is my hands. Beyond the increased wrinkling, emerging age spots, and arthritic swollen knuckles, I suffer from Dupuytren’s Contracture (or disease or syndrome or fracture), a painless affliction, a hardening of the fibrous tissue beneath the skin of the palm that causes the fingers corresponding to the affected tissue to slowly flex or curl eventually into a permanent grip. There’s no known cause for the disease, though it seems to be hereditary and perhaps related to alcohol (also a part of my heredity).

I can’t recall when I first noticed the symptoms (it supposedly takes sometimes decades to develop), but at least by the fall of 2007 I’d noticed the nodules in my right palm and that my pinky finger was significantly bent, and had problems getting change from my right pocket and using that finger to type. I went to see my hand surgeon (I’d had an arthritis-related cyst removed from a knuckle a couple of years before, so already had my own hand surgeon), and it didn’t take him more than a few minutes to measure, explain, and recommend surgery – opening up most of the palm of the hand and cutting out the growths, which would hopefully ease the contracture. I didn’t want to see my hand further deformed and lose more function, so I agreed to the surgery.

My father suffered from arthritis, sometimes severe, for at least the last 30 years of his life. The last nine years he lived in a nursing home, confined to his bed and a wheelchair. He would regularly wince in pain doing simple tasks involving his hands – eating meals, taking his medicine several times a day, talking on the phone. When he did talk on the phone, he would hold the handset in his left hand (he was right-handed), against his right ear (his hearing weak in his left), presumably because of pain in his right hand.

But after my diagnosis of and research into Dupuytren’s (coincidentally, only a couple of months after my father’s death at 92), I suspected that he too could have suffered from the disease. So I went into the photos that I’d taken at his 90^th birthday party. We’d taken him from the nursing home to a nearby park, with a lodge where we could accommodate a good number of family and friends and allow him to have food and drink (wine) that he didn’t typically have in the nursing home. And when I looked at a number of the photos that showed him sitting in his wheelchair, holding food or a drink, there was not one of his using his right hand; he had every fork or glass in his left hand, with his right hand resting on his right leg, not spread across the thigh but rather cocked off to the side, as I now must do.

My surgery didn’t go perfectly, though three years later I can still retrieve change from my pocket and use my pinky finger to type. But as my surgeon warned, the contracture did return to some degree, and I am now regularly stretching not just my right pinky finger, but most all of my fingers on both my right and left hands, as there has been a progression of the disease, also as anticipated. It’s just in my genes. But at least I know what’s happening.