granddad blogging: tough love

Last time in granddad blogging, my grandfather took the bad end of the deal on the first day of school. This week he experiences a little tough love.


When I was a little old boy, and like lots of little boys, I was fascinated by knives. My Uncle Ben had a real pretty little knife with a real sharp blade. He always kept a sharp knife, and I wanted to see it. He didn’t much want me to see it and my daddy said not to, but anyway somehow or another I finally got to see it and I took it and stabbed it in a locus tree. I remember where we were. In our front yard there was four locust trees that grew real close together and I was standing sort of in the middle of them and I stabbed this knife in one of those trees.
I didn’t have a good hold on the handle and my hand slipped down the blade of the knife and sliced into my hand down into the bone, cut the leaders in two and that’s the reason always now my little finger is still stiff on my right hand and not as large as the little finger on my left hand.

It hurt real bad, and my daddy said that was good enough for me. We were supposed to go pick beans that afternoon, and I didn’t want to go ‘cause I’d hurt my hand and he said if I hadn’t played with that knife I wasn’t supposed to I wouldn’t have hurt my hand, so let’s go pick beans.

He gave me a big basket and we picked beans and got it full. I couldn’t carry it in my left hand so I had to carry it in my right hand and I guess that pulled my hand a little more. But anyways it was a long time before my finger got well and it’s always been stiff*. I would say I was about 8 or 9, pretty young.

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I made a terrible mistake one time, I don’t know what happened, but I did something that displeased my daddy and I had rubber boots that came up to my knees and he picked up a switch or had a switch or something, anyway, he gave me a good switchin’ on the legs. But, of course, he was hittin’ me on those boots, and I told him “That didn’t hurt!”, and he said “Well, we’ll come up a little higher and see if that’ll hurt.” And it did. And I didn’t say any more about that.

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*His stiff and unbending pinkie finger was a source of endless fascination for us grandchildren. Because he had cut through a tendon (I guess) the finger could bend if he bent it with the fingers of his other hand or we did it for him, but it had no normal motion he could control. The lame finger was a salient, but unobserved lesson not to play with knives.


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