 |
| A strange combo, to be sure. Read on. |
When I was thirteen years old, I got my first job working at a deli market. Two doors down from Sonoma's historic plaza, the deli was a popular lunch destination for all kinds of people: shop workers, construction guys, tourists, and laborers. Jim, the owner who hired me, was a great boss. He was the picture of decorum during business hours, until the older employees went home and the teenagers were left to close up. Then, he would swear like a sailor–always in jest–to horrify and entertain us. We loved him.
The "older employees" consisted of three or four women who became like a whole fleet of grandmothers to me. They were good country folk, hard-working, no-nonsense women who taught me how to make egg salad, prepare all the sandwich fixins, and slice deli meat on the giant electric slicer. They teased each other, but not me: they were strong, plain, kind, and funny.
Shone's Deli is also where I met Ann, the best friend a soon-to-be high schooler could possibly find, and we quickly knew we would be by each other's side for life. Landing the deli job was a hugely positive development in my young life.
My first day of work, however, was not an auspicious beginning. At first, everything went fine: I was soaking up all the training, figuring out how to make a roast beef sandwich just like the customer ordered, and ringing up orders at the ancient cash register, all while managing not to freak out when cute boys came in. But then, on my first solo voyage with the meat slicer, disaster struck. The tip of my left index finger got in the way of the spinning blade, giving the roast beef a little something extra as my A negative plasma spurted all over the slicer's gleaming chrome.
I did not react well to the sight of my own blood; the wooziness began immediately. Thankfully, the grandmothers jumped right in. One of them, Helen, whisked me away to the back room, magically producing a glass of ice water to calm me down. A couple more cleaned everything up lickety-split: no customers were the wiser. Helen bandaged me up like the experienced farm hand/mom/grandmother she was, and sent me home a wee bit early from my shift – and slightly lighter than when I'd arrived, now missing the tip of my finger.
I always felt kind of stupid about that injury. I had wanted to do well at my new job. I didn't want to cause any problems or draw too much attention to myself. Bloodying up the workspace was not exactly the kind of value I wanted to add as a new employee.
But rather than making a big deal out of my mishap or lecturing me too much, Jim and the grandmothers just welcomed me back the next day. They were as matter of fact as you'd expect good country folk to be, and we all just got to work, smiling at customers and taking orders. The slicer and I got along fine after that and I never had another work place injury. I went on to work there for four more years, until I graduated from high school and went to college. It was a great, easy job, with fun people, and it put spending money in my teenage pockets. All that's left now of that first day is a hardened, crescent-shaped scar on the tip of my left index finger.
I have developed an absent-minded habit over the years of circling the crescent with my thumb, almost surprised every time I feel how calloused and un-skin-like it has become. Every so often, I recall the day I got that scar. I can hear the whirr of the electric blade and feel the sharp pain and the rising wooziness. I also remember feeling stupid and silly, embarrassed about causing a ruckus on day one. Tiny as it is, it has always been a quiet rebuke to me over the years.
But then. Then something happened that might make me believe, for the first time in my life, that Everything Actually Does Happen for a Reason: I took up the fiddle. Two years ago, I started taking fiddle lessons after years and years of wanting to. Learning to play those beautiful strings has been one of the greatest joys of my adult life; it has also been extremely challenging. Those lovely sounds that professionals make? Those are the culmination of an incredible about of practice, coordination, skill, and technique. There's so much more to it than I ever anticipated, and I find my brain, body, and creativity stretched in multiple ways. My new hobby is a lot of damn work.
Happily, it turns out that having a pre-installed callous on one's left index finger is quite beneficial to the whole endeavor. One of the first things you have to accomplish when learning a fiddle is building up the necessary callouses on the second, third, and fourth fingers of your left hand. Thanks to Shone's Deli, I came to this party ahead of the game. Yes, I still needed to build callouses, but my index finger was already a seasoned pro. Pressing hard with that finger produced no pain at all, and the little scar's moment to shine had arrived. Now, when my left thumb circles the hardened crescent on finger #4, I don't think about shaving off the tip of that finger with a meat slicer. I think instead about how that scar helps me play the D note in a A major scale. I think, with pleasure, about how my whole hand knows how to deftly move its fingers in order to play St. Anne's Reel and Angeline the Baker and many other traditional bluegrass and celtic tunes. I freakin' love that scar now.
Who knew that something that happened when I was 13, something I had only ever seen as residue from an episode I'd rather forget, would play such a central role in one of the most positive developments of my middle-aged life? Not I, said the duck, but I'm endlessly grateful to have experienced this happy convergence of events.
It makes me wonder what else in my life might be acting in this mysterious way. What strange scars and bumps have morphed into something beautiful and beneficial? Which ones will do so in my future? What gratitude am I missing? How have the experiences of my life layered one on top of the other to get me where I am today, mother of five, wife of (still just the) one, fiddler, writer, pray-er, friend? It's a lot to ponder. All I know is that I find great comfort in discovering that something painful has become something joyful. There is so much hope in that discovery.
A tiny scar. A life-changing new practice. Linked forever, and beautifully.
***
No comments:
Post a Comment