Thumb
Consider the finely engineered human body. For example, my left thumb, the one missing 1/8 of an inch. It's just an inconsequential scratch, isn't it?
The human body is a machine of extraordinary intricacy. From our towering intelligence to the smallest of our digits, we live inside a construction of surpassing brilliance. We don’t usually notice the miraculous interconnectedness of its parts. Not, at least, until one of those parts stops working. Or becomes, shall we say, detached.
Take, for example, the thumb. More specifically, take my thumb. The left thumb. Or to be more precise, the missing last 1/8 inch of my left thumb.
The other day I was standing in my kitchen dicing fruit. My cutting board was clean, my knife was sharp, and my attention was concentrated on the hundreds of precise, fine cuts that I had to make.
I worked my way through college and law school working in restaurants. If you aggregate the amount of time I’ve spent chopping, slicing and dicing, it probably adds up to at least a year out of my more than 50 years. I’ve made millions and millions of precise cuts, all with surgically sharp blades slashing half a millimeter from my fingertips. One thing I learned a long time ago (exactly 34 years ago, actually, while slicing onions in my first commercial kitchen): If you never, ever look up while you have a knife in your hand, you aren’t likely to lose a finger.
But one of the other extraordinary things about this body of ours is that our brains are not quite computers. We forget. Our attention wanders. Lessons dissolve in the presence of distractions.
I want to assure you that I’m not writing to whine about my wound. I only lost a few centimeters off the end of my thumb. There are plenty of people living with more serious losses than mine. My wound is, in the cosmic scheme of things, a mere inconvenience.
An inconvenience, but a significant inconvenience all the same. It’s amazing just how much you need that little piece of flesh. You only find out just how big a part of your life your thumb is when you lose the use of it.
Try this experiment. Button a button without using your thumb. (It’s nearly impossible.) Or try holding something firmly in your palm without using your thumb. (It’s not possible.) Try tying your shoes without using your thumb, or buttoning your pants, or even tucking in your shirt. (Tough, tough, tough.)
Here’s proof that statistics lie. I lost less than 1/10 of my thumb. That’s 1/10 of a finger that is only 1/10 of the total complement of fingers that I carry. Statistics would suggest that the loss to my dexterity would therefore be a piddling 1/100. But the actual loss has proven to be a great deal more than that. In practice, I must have lost more like 40% or maybe 50% of my total dexterity, to say nothing of having lost nearly 100% of my wife’s patience when I ask her to, well just for example, button my shirt for me.
Of course, having just lost the use of my thumb a week ago, you might think that I would be avoiding cutting boards and sharp knives for a while. And you might even think that I would have re-learned the lesson about not looking up while chopping. But the human mind, as incredible an instrument as it is, has certain limitations.
So, this morning found me standing in my kitchen, chopping apples. I was being particularly careful, largely because the circumcised thumb is on my left, apple-securing hand, as opposed to my right, knife-wielding hand. Still, I’ve wielded knives for years and even down one thumb, I quickly got the hang of thumbless cutting. I was slicing and dicing with great panache when I heard a suspicious noise behind me.
To understand what happened next, you have to know that I live with a two-year-old Airedale.Airedales are wonderful companions, the Boy Scouts of dogs. They are brave, they are clean, and they are reverent. They are not, alas, obedient. They march to the beat of their own drummer. To turn your back on an Airedale is to invite mischief. To turn your back on an Airedale making suspicious noises is to lose situational awareness in an environment of potential mass destruction.
The suspicious noise suggested that little Miss Emma had sauntered into the kitchen about the time I started chopping. My mind was analyzing how much trouble Emma could get in while I was distracted. The answer was obvious: much, much trouble. So,I turned to see what the wee little beastie was destroying, my hand still mindlessly chopping.
It was stupid, I admit. I should have known better. I do know better. But alas, the human mind has its limitations.
Don’t worry. I did not chop another part of my thumb off. It’s just a scratch, really. And only on my little finger, which hardly gets any use. I barely got any blood on the towel that I snatched from Emma’s jaws as she was joyously tearing it apart. I’m confident the finger will heal before long.
The human body is, after all, a wondrous thing.