Now What Are You Going to Do With Your Hands?

By MccABe coolidge

Our hands cupped around glasses of red wine, a candle flickers, almost in cadence with our short spurts of words. We sit, bereft, until the pause becomes pregnant with another offering. My friend, Susan, looks at me, right above the candle flame and says, “Now, what are you going to do with your hands?”

I glance at my wife, Cathy, still focused on her glass of wine, empty? Needs filling, maybe she isn’t listening. She drifts away. Often.

I stare at Susan, a frown on my face, waiting to hear more words. “What ever does she mean?” I wonder. “Hands?”

Through the evening we have been listening to Leonard Cohen. Especially “Suzanne,” these long, lonely days I am in free fall, “Suzanne takes you down.” I get it. In that moment, the three of us begin weeping. That question going way below the surface of our lives, spiraling down.

Robin is seated on the side of her hospital bed. Her left arm has an IV attached to it; her feet are stretched out. A man sitting on a stool is leaning down and painting her toenails. Robin giggles. “Wait a minute,” I say to myself. “It’s Charlie Schafer, her pediatrician.” His hands gently, slowly paint each toenail. It’s October 27, Robin’s birthday. She has been admitted to UNC Hospital and we have just been told that tomorrow we should take Robin home. “Nothing more we can do for her here; take her home and just love her,” the attending physician speaks low, glancing to his right, then left, like he wants to be somewhere else. one wild and precious life?”

Sitting at that wheel, wedging that clay. Mesmerized by the turning of the wheel, the mystery of form emerging from a chunk of earth. When sorrow overwhelmed and sadness took me way down, Thursday nights arrived with a little Stan Getz and his saxophone in the background. I would tie my apron. Sit down, cup my hands, and the journey into the unknown would begin.

We clung to an elusive hope. Robin was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis when she was 2. We were taught to do a light, steady “tapping” — three and often four times a day — percussive-like, with cupped hands on each lobe of her lungs. We named it, “time for tat.”

We were told this would keep her alive. Longer. The goal of “tat” was to loosen up the phlegm in her lungs so she would cough and cough, staving off pneumonia. Coughing hurt Robin and she resisted and tried to hide a cough. A double bind for us. Tapping on the lobes of her lungs hurt her and yet, to keep her alive, we had to hurt her.

On Christmas Day we stopped tat. Her mother and I looked at each other and we stood there, quiet, allowing Robin to sleep in.

In the midst of the celebration of the United States Bicentennial Year early in the morning of Martin Luther King Day, Robin woke us up at 5 a.m. I picked her up and checked her fingers, blue. Her breathing slow, faint. I went to her mother, “Better come into Robin’s room.” We held her, smothered her with kisses and prayed that her journey home would be without pain.

What was I going to do with my one wild and precious life, when I couldn’t keep alive a life, so precious, that was given to me? Wander. Pay attention to longings and yearnings. So I did. Bought an abandoned farm on a river, down a long gravel road, an hour from Chapel Hill.

Many years later, I took dance classes at Harvard, separated from my wife, moved onto a sailboat in San Francisco Bay. Started up a big rambling home for HIV folks in Asheville with my beloved. Still through all this grief and searching, I kept my hands in clay.

It’s the first weekend in December and I am sitting on a stool in the parking lot of High Point Library. It’s a craft fair for those wanting handmade art for Christmas presents. Although a bit nippy, I am wedging clay, throwing it down on the wheel to begin centering and pulling up. A family of five is watching me, the two youngest children held by the mother. The older one and the father are intent on the movement of my palm and fingers . . . a cup slowly emerges.

Susan takes another sip of her wine and asks again: “So what are you going to do with your hands?” She pauses, holds the wine glass in both hands: “I have signed up for a pottery class, a week after Easter. At Meredith. 6 – 8 p.m., Thursdays. I want you to come with me.”

In my mind I am reviewing my life: “B.A. in economics. M.B.A. in marketing, an advanced degree in theology and she wants me to sign up for an art class!”

Thursday night. There is a porch. Four kilns. Susan and I walk into the white cottage. A shaggy guy, tall and bulky with a winsome smile on his face speaks: “Welcome, I’m John. John Givens. This is a beginning pottery class. Take a seat at the wheel, any wheel.”

What do you do when your child dies in your arms? When you have been helpless in stopping the pain? Emptied out of any hope and meaning? An avid reader of poetry, Mary Oliver continues to ask of me, “What are you going to do with your

The dad looks at me as I take a short break to breathe a little more deeply and to inspect how this pot is coming along. He asks, “I love watching your hands and what you can do on that wheel, how did you get into pottery? What got you going?” OH

McCabe Coolidge wants to live fully with these passions: surrounded by love from his sweetheart and three daughters; and with his hands in clay, pen on paper, paddle in water, feet celebrating Tracy Chapman singing “Give Me One Reason” and Leonard Cohen singing “Suzanne.”