What makes my thumbs different from yours

When I open my hands palms-down in front of me, I see two little mounds — calluses — in the Vs between thumbs and forefingers. I think of these parts of my hands as oar locks, where the shaft of my kayak paddle — the pole-y part between the flat paddle blades — rotates in my [...]

Fragment IV

Rodin’s The Walking Man always appealed to you because of that pigeon-toed stride.  He has no thumbs at all, nor hands, nor arms, nor head, nor genitalia. Body parts deliberately left out. No distracting expressions of face or hands. Just a fragment: torso mounted on legs. The energy is there all the same. The features [...]

Fragment II

In anatomy, the thumb has many names: the first finger, pollex, digitus primus, or digitus I. It consists of three bones:

distal phalanx (of the first digit)
proximal phalanx (of the first digit)
first metacarpal

Eight muscles control its movements:

opponens pollicis
abductor pollicis brevis
flexor pollicis brevis
adductor pollicis
flexor pollicis longus
abductor pollicis [...]

Fragment I

Parts. A thumb is part of a hand. A hand is part of an arm. An arm is part of a body, which is part of a woman, who is part of a family, species, planetary ecosystem, cosmos. 

I’m 40-percent thumbs

Despite the popularity of the saying, we humans will never be “all thumbs.” Ten million years from now, however, we could be “almost half thumbs.” A professor and chief surgeon at the Robert A. Chase Hand & Upper Limb Center at Stanford told me she sees a trend toward the little finger becoming a second thumb. [...]

Playing with fire

When I was little, we’d buy fireworks from vacant lot stands off the freeway. Then my friends and I would light them at the beach on the 4th.  I remember hopping frantically to avoid getting hit by screeching projectiles flying at ankle level. I also remember burning my index finger and thumb with a sparkler. With that seared thumb in [...]

Aye-aye, captain

In the dimness of the nocturnal house we could see the aye-ayes parading along horizontal branches, making daring leaps from one branch to branch, and pausing so we could drink in the spectacle of their crazy staring eyes, their disheveled fur, and those bizarre hands . . .
(read the whole story by wildlife writer Susan McCarthy [...]

More thumb (and random Japanese) superstitions

If a funeral hearse drives past, you must hide your thumb in a fist. This is because the Japanese word for thumb literally translates as “parent-finger” and hiding it is considered protection for your parent. If you don’t, your parent will die.
When you are nervous, write “human beings” ( “ningen” 人間 ) in Japanese on [...]

When you see a one-eyed cat …

“When you see a one-eyed cat, spit on your thumb, stamp it in the palm of your hand, and make a wish. The wish will come true,” says an American superstition.
From what I’ve read, the one-eyed cat used to be associated with witches because “the Evil One could create nothing perfect.” And saliva was believed to [...]

Monument to the Unknown Hitchhiker

Back in March, I wrote a post that I titled (oh-so-cleverly, I thought) No Sissy reply. In that post, I reported that I had written Even Cowgirls Get the Blues author Tom Robbins a letter about Sissy Hankshaw’s thumbs and received no response. I also expressed very little faith that I would receive any response. So [...]