A father's hands

My father's hands, Ethel's Lounge, Waterloo

I don't think my dad realized I was taking this picture as we sat talking over a Father's Day pint today.
At 83, his hands have done many things, but snapping photos with a smartphone is not one of them.
As a boy, he used these now-gnarled hands to pick and sell apples from trees not far from the bar where we met today. The trees are now long gone, of course.
When his parents ran country hotels in the 1930s, and sold hooch in defiance of Ontario's stiff liquor laws, he used them to hide the bottles in a sawdust pile outside the local sawmill whenever word of a raid was on the wind.
He'd then use the same hands to search for the same bottles, sometimes in vain.
He used them to play his faithful Gibson ES-350 on stages around the province, and on dozens of episodes of his musical variety show on CKCO-TV, when TV was newer than the internet is now.
This therefore meant using them to punch out the loudmouthed hoods who asked "Where are your horses?" as a way of mocking the cowboy attire he and his bandmates wore.
His right index and middle fingers cradled untold thousands of cigarettes over a span of 45 years, until a dying friend clamped a hand around my dad's wrist and implored him to stop. And he did, cold turkey, more than 20 years ago.
They spanked (not often), and pointed fingers of warning and blame. They also tickled and waved and tossed us headlong into Lake Huron, from the makeshift diving board of his shoulders.
They still turn a steering wheel; for how much longer, nobody knows, and so they fidget with worry.
When we shook hands and said goodbye, my dad's hand felt thin and papery in mine, but still strong.
A couple of hours later, I shook my own son's hand when I dropped him off at work, and wondered what he felt.