Grandma's Hands

Grandma’s hands

When I was quite young, I found going to church every Sunday morning a tedious waste of time. My child-like logic could find nothing justifiable about sitting on hard-wooden pews for hours on end, trying to keep my eyes open while the minister droned on about something totally irrelevant and incomprehensible to anyone this side of old age.

Singing the hymns offered no respite from the aggravation. Most of the songs were either written an octave higher than anyone, other than Maria Callas, could enjoy singing, or with tunes too complicated to disentangle and get into.

Still, I reasoned, church must have had some kind of appeal else why would it be so full every week?

One Sunday, something happened that brought me a little closer to understanding the riddle, an experience that activated a deep-seated curiosity initiated a quest that would dominate the next fifty years of my life.

I sat next to my grandmother and played with the bulging, blue veins lacing the backside of her ancient hands, (se was forty-five), a Sunday-morning preoccupation that never failed to fascinate me. I'd single out one of the larger purple/gray protuberances and with the tip of my finger press it back into the surrounding skin until it disappeared. Then I'd slowly trace my finger along the translucent skin until the vein sprang back into sight. I repeated the process with another vein. And another.

Eventually, the vein game got boring. Then, I’d put her hand back on her lap and reach up to play with the hanging flab of skin on the underside of her arm. I gently slapped the doughy substance of her flabby triceps this way and that, half-listening to the voice of the preacher droning relentlessly on in the background.

That particular afternoon, the heat and boredom lulled me into a trance-like stupor. The fear my father would smack me alongside the head coupled with the spellbinding captivation with the sagging skin of my grandmother's aged arm kept me from sinking into total unconsciousness.

Out of the blue, I was flooded with an intense feeling of pleasure and peace. Within a heartbeat, an energetic but soothing heat rushed up the center of my back and exploded into tiny particles of light just behind my half-lidded eyes. It felt as though every cell of my body was dancing in a contained state of quiet ecstasy. (That’s not how I would have described it back then. I also wouldn’t have said it felt like a cosmic orgasm, which, upon reflection, wouldn’t have been too far off base. Back then, the experience scared the bejesus out of me because I thought I peed my pants.)

Minutes after it had passed, I realized I wanted more. A lot more!

I knew something very holy, very meaningful and very horny had just happened and I wanted it to happen again. But how?

Years later, I realized this incident was my first step on the proverbial journey of a thousand miles; the point when I first began my pursuit of the elusive state of enlightenment.

For the next years, I did everything known to mankind to make that meaningful experience happen again. I attended all Sunday services, strained my vocal cords to sing the meaningless hymns, participated in the boring litanies, and tried desperately to stay awake during the preacher’s senseless sermons.

To no avail.

Thinking the transcendental experience might have had something to do with the back of my grandmother’s hands, I rubbed them raw. The next week, she sat between my brother and sister and left me to my own devices.

It wasn’t until the later part of the sixties, that I re-experienced that same feeling of spaced-out bliss. Only this time, I wasn’t in a church and I wasn’t sitting next to my grandmother. I was sitting on a couch in the living room of a person with whom I was about to have my very first sexual encounter. And it was his hand I was playing with this time. The sacred melodies now drifting through my head were not from the choir up to the left of a church altar, but from Jefferson Airplane booming out of the stereo on the other side of the room. And, it wasn’t the droning voice of the preacher that was lulling me into a state of ecstatic bliss but the lid of grass I had just shared with the guy seated next to me. Looking back, I realize I was far closer to finding God that evening than on any Sunday afternoon in my youth.

Now, I spend my time following the veins on the backside of my own aged hands. Not in church. Mostly on the toilet, the only place where I allow the time for such ridiculous folly.

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Excerpt from my book: Seeking Oz.