
As I was getting out of our friend Marc’s PT Cruiser one evening after naked yoga class, I stumbled and fell on the sidewalk landing on my right-hand pinky finger. I dislocated it but, out of fearlessness, I managed to snap it back in place. Sort of.
The finger never recovered its straightness. My friend Dan — also my physical therapist — taught me an exercise to fix the problem, warning me that it required diligence and some bondage: you wrap a long shoelace around the finger, like wrapping prosciutto slices around bread sticks. I lacked diligence and am allergic to bondage, so the remedy remained truncated. “Adieu to those thirteenth chords on the piano!” my mind was ruminating, its focus on the negative.
But some months later, while browsing a book by Bernard Berenson on Venetian painters of the Renaissance1, I noticed the way artists painted the hands of angels, apostles, virgins, shepherds. Fingers are flexible, mostly bent, not different from my dislocated pinky. And I read that the more expressive a hand was rendered, the more coveted an artist was in those days. I felt much better about my handicap, and switched my mind to thinking how good it felt to be part of art.
1 Bernard Berenson, The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance with an Index to Their Works, G.P. Putnam & Sons, New York and London, 1894. Also available at Project Gutenberg: gutenberg.org