One day my father asked me to help him clean out the trap under the basement sink. It was a simple job, requiring little skill -- some quick adjustments to the jaws of the wrench for a snug fit, a few firm shoves on the end of the long orange handle to loosen the nuts, and the trap could be removed easily by hand. Hardly open-heart surgery.

As I sat cross-legged on the cool concrete floor, ducking my head to avoid the tub, I muttered under my breath at this disruption of my Saturday routine. Besides, I wasn’t getting along all that well with Dad; his drinking, always a problem, had gotten worse since retirement. By evening his speech was slurred, he was irritable, and he sometimes forgot what he said from one sentence to the next.

With the morning’s semblance of sobriety settling uneasily on his face, he hovered over me, fussy with inactivity. His hands hung at his sides like a boxer who knows he’s been defeated and only awaits the verdict of the judges. He tried to be useful, providing me with moral support and coaching me through the steps of the simple procedure. “Jesus Christ,” I thought, “Mission Control.” Afterwards I asked Mom why he needed my help.

“It’s his hands -- he thinks they’re clumsy, he’s always been ashamed of them,” she said. The drinking can’t be helping much, I thought, for once checking my sharp tongue.

Dad’s hands, one of the givens of childhood. I had never paid much attention to them. Now they suddenly seemed large and blocky, thick-fingered and big-knuckled, fleshy and slow to move as if trapped in thick gloves.

It was another of those intimate details about the private lives of parents. You were sprung from their loins, raised by them, lived with them for years, knew their curious and irritating habits, smelled their stink when they left the bathroom, but you didn’t know beans about their all-too-humanness, what made them vulnerable. Either that was kept hidden from you, or you chose, for reasons of your own, to ignore it.
My father’s hands, what did I know of them as a child? I remember them laying out his keys, wallet, pipe, tobacco and mints in a tidy row on the top of the dresser every night so he could leave for work at exactly 7:10 the next morning. Was he ever late?

Those hands gripped the buckling bottom of his briefcase when he came home from work every afternoon, tie loosened, grey fedora tipped back on his head. Inside the worn leather pouch, scrawled on yellow legal pads in his almost indecipherable script, lay those case histories of his elderly clients so elegantly written they were read and admired by his colleagues at the welfare office.

During the fall he’d schedule his clients so he could come home early and take me hunting in the fields and sloughs west of Robbinsdale. I remember those hands, strong and sure, grasping the barrel and stock of his twelve-gauge shotgun, leading with a long, steady arc the startled flight of a pheasant flushed from the stubble of the corn rows. They shone bright with blood as he knelt before the fallen bird and ripped its belly open with his thick-hafted hunting knife before wiping his fingers clean on the dry field grass.

On paydays, every other Friday without fail, he came home later than usual, his face flushed, those hands full of booty, clutching a six-pack of Pepsi and a bag full of comic books and candy bars for me and my brother, and a bottle of Four Roses for him and Mom. On one of those drunken Friday nights, in our cramped kitchen, those hands flashed in front of my face, knotted in fists, as he danced round me, a tall, thin sissy boy of thirteen, taunting me to box with him: “C’mon, it’ll make a man of you.”

How could I have known then the full story behind those jabbing fists, their mysterious mix of mastery and insecurity, accomplishment and failure? Not till much later, when I was grown and had a child of my own, did I learn from my Aunt Virginia how devotedly those hands had scrubbed his mother’s kitchen floor, scoured her pots and pans, steadfast in their toil even when the neighbor kids came calling to invite him to join in one of their sandlot baseball games.

And not until later still, when it was no longer possible to deny his alcoholism, did I grasp the full extent of the bitterness that lay behind those sharp jabs at the air with his thick fingers whenever he was in a mood to indict his own father. Grandpa was a proud, aloof Swede whose large, skillful hands had painted houses and churches, built cabinets and remodeled basements, directed the activities of countless work crews. Grandpa doted on his daughters, disparaged his sons. Dad used to joke that if by some chance he had been elevated to the presidency, Grandpa would have thought the office somehow demeaned. Once, in a fiery “j’accuse,” with that lucidity of despair peculiar to the drunk, Dad held Grandpa accountable for the death of my Uncle Kenneth, who died at 38 from acute alcoholism in a flophouse in L.A.

But these hands were not the hands I knew as a boy. Those hands expressed quiet mastery. They turned the earth, raked in peat moss and manure, culled out the rocks and glass, transforming hard, lumpy clay to fertile loam. Spring after spring they planted tomatoes, beans, onions, cucumbers and strawberries. They laid in the tender shoots of our buckthorn hedge, then watered and weeded and pruned it year after year till it grew thick and matted, an impenetrable wall. Every Saturday I saw those hands, floured and poised above the large crockery bowl, ready to begin the ritual of punching and kneading the bread dough, whose mysterious risings under the damp towel set the rhythms of the day for more than thirty years. And though my father has been dead for five years now, I can still see those hands wrapped in tender embrace of the bowl of his briar pipe as he sat alone, silent, on the front stoop in the deepening dusk, fingering and fussing over the sweet tobacco, repeatedly tamping it down to keep the coal pulsing and alive, perfuming the humid summer air with its pungent smoke.

That Saturday morning, as I cleaned the trap, stuck in my resentments, the awkward remnant of an unfinished childhood, what did I know of those hands that now hung heavy and useless at his sides? It was more than the drinking -- that was a symptom of something deeper, a long, slow slide into defeat and despair. A life in which the forces of creation and destruction, order and chaos, had been kept perilously, beautifully in balance, was unraveling before all our eyes.

Bob Anderson is a long-time Men's Center member and Anger Management facilitator.