Proverbs 24, Verse 5
"A wise man is mightier than a strong man. Wisdom is mightier than strength."
CHIPPED WISDOM:
I don't know if you and your father played like this, but, sometimes, when I was a little boy, I would try to inflict pain on my father. I'm sure there's some Freudian out there who will stumble across this blog long after it's been abandoned by its author-- say, you know, in 2 months-- and he'll go, "Ah-HAH" and imagine me wanting to sleep with my mother and Hamlet and soaked pajamas and all that other shit, and that's fine. But, the fact remains that, for whatever it was, sometimes that's how we would play. He would tense his muscles in his abdomen and invite me to hit him, which I gleefully did, typically in the basement. That's where we did our WWF shit. Sometimes I'd try to get all his fingers in my hand and squeeze them as hard as I could, to try to crush them.
When I was a little boy, my father's fingers seemed proportional to sausage links. Looking back on it recently, I assumed that this was because I was so tiny and he seemed like such a leviathan to me back then, and that that's just how I was remembering things. And it was only a couple days or so ago that I really looked at his fingers closely and noticed that, yeah, that's what they really look like.
My father has fucking sausage fingers. The man is immense.
I mean, he's not-- he's maybe 5'8" or so, but he's huge.
At 6'0", I tower over him, but only as height is concerned. In every other way, I'm a bit like a balloon that's had its helium surgically removed. The man's a giant. And, yes, once upon a time, he was an Israeli soldier. He rode in tanks and he killed people and he defied authority and he was punished and played practical jokes on bunkmates and he endured a brutal field operation on his hemorrhoids after collapsing during a march, which I'm sure he'd be delighted with me writing about on a blog viewable by Freudian assholes.
He didn't get very far in the ranks, and I'm sure his attitude problem didn't help. Samal rishon, or "staff sergeant". His rank looks like this:
This is a picture of an Israeli army uniform shirt with my father's rank on it. I stole it from some website. I had to do it because this isn't actually my father's uniform, and I think that's been permanently lost. He doesn't know where it is. He doesn't care. I once asked him if he had any of his old medals, because I was playing Sir Joseph Porter, KCB in a production of "H.M.S. Pinafore" and the more medals I could have on my uniform the better. So I called my father one night and asked him if he knew where his old medals were. All these calls begin innocuously enough. He replied,
"You think I give a FUCK about some stupid piece of shit on a goddamn fucking ribbon from those assholes?! I don't fucking know where that shit is! Yeah, I got medals. BIG FUCKING DEAL!"
I could envision his sausage fingers gripping his cellphone with strangle-worthy intensity as he shouted, not at me, I understood, at Israel. At the place that almost took his life and his chance to have a family, a place that has made so many of its young expendable for some might argue dubious reasons.
Every boy, I think, in some way, even if not in a big way, wants to grow up and be like their father. I think, from a very early age, I knew that I was going to be maybe the furthest thing from my father imaginable. My fingers are, and have always been, long, delicate, slender, graceful. They're not sausage links. I had to get a woman's wedding band, for Christ's sake, because no man's ring I tried on even came close to fitting. But I have his temper. I have his body hair, and his dark skin. I have his skin tags, and I expect I'll only get more of those as time ticks by. And I have a fierce love and dedication to my family, which, I guess, is more important than what my fingers look like or whether I could have withstood torture by Palestinian forces.
He's strong and he's wise. I'm not sure, most days, that I'm either, but I think it's a lot to ask of a thirty-three-year old to be "wise". We'll check in again after my hair has gone white and my olive-toned face is covered in skin tags.
I wanted to wear a uniform because he did. I wanted to become a cop, and maybe I would have risen to the rank of sergeant and stopped there, too. Or maybe not. I was an EMT for a couple years, but that was just play time. I wanted to be something more. Crisp. Clean. Proud. Pained.
After all, there is just something about a man in uniform, isn't there?
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