Steadfast Hands                       

My hands don't resemble those of my grandfather---                                                                  
thick fingers, taut skin pulled over large knuckles;
hands that retrieved the money sewn into his pocket
by his mother upon his immigration from Austria
to America, that said the final goodbye to his family.

Hands that toiled from the turn of the century,
over thirty years, seven days a week,
in his New York City grocery stores:
lifting heavy milk containers into the icebox,
layering round vats of butter with a wire cutter,
positioning burlap sacks of coffee near the coffee grinder,
moving cartons of canned goods onto shelves,
packaging bags of sugar from a barrel, candling and grading eggs,
pushing pushcarts, delivering orders to customers,
selecting vegetables at market before dawn,
mopping down the tile floor each night.

Those are the hands that held his babies, grieved
when his wife died prematurely, that pushed his children on swings
in an empty lot across the street, that held the newspaper
where he checked the stocks, grieving his 1929 losses.

In my childhood I watched those hands scoop out
a grapefruit leaving nothing but peel. Tipping it toward us
he'd say, "This is the way to eat a grapefruit!" I watched
those hands swing at his side, broad shoulders, steady stride,
walking miles over city blocks and country roads. I watched
as they lifted his eighty-year-old body on chinning bars
in the country, smiling proudly. I felt annoyed by those hands
pinching my cheeks, their only gesture of love."She doesn't like it!
Why do you do it?" my stepgrandmother admonishing. He shoved
his wife's gold watch pendant at me, my namesake's initials
carved on its face."I do not want it," my eight-year-old sensibility said,
pushing it back, his hands roughly persisting.

My hands aren't thick and solid like those of my grandfather,
but the other day I thought I noticed something of his in mine.