About Me

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I like to write and I like to party, but mostly just the writing. Disclaimer: A lot of these stories are true ones. The memory of growing-up in and around Killybegs. When you hold a mirror up to small communities, sometimes there are those who don't like the reflection. Capote knew this only too well. If you find the refraction just a little too much and would like the angle of incidence changed in your favor, please email me at georgevial@hotmail.com and I will be happy to make a name change here or there.

Thursday, December 22, 2005

Hands

Small, not exactly man-hands, is what most people would say about these hands. Many times they’ve been engulfed in size by those of other males, laughed at and called girl-hands. But they’re mine and for me they work fine.

I’ve arm-wrestled brutes and the look of disbelief when these small hands slam theirs to the table is certainly worth any joking at the expense of my hands.

These hands have fought bare-knuckled, saving me from a beating. These hands have taken me many miles away from my home. A young girl once fell in love with them and I followed her across the ocean so she could feel them wrapped around her in the cold mid-Western winter.

These hands bare fruit to me, from the poems and stories I craft to the culinary delights I create in the kitchen everyday at work.

These hands are scarred, the skin is sucked dry of moisture from long hours in the hard-water of the kitchen. Flecks of hair grace the knuckles and the back of the palms. The scars from digging as a kid and finding the sharp edge of glass in the dirt, scars from frustration crashing into to walls and barroom brawls. Scars from clutching a pan too hot and having the skin painfully peels away as the pain is forgotten in the haste of having to get the meals served.

The nails are well-kept, sometimes black builds up under them and I meticulously pick it out with a file or knife-point. The palms are well lined, with a long lifeline running down the left one and an unpredictable marriage line going perpendicular to that.

These hands are mine and when I curl them in hook-like to examine them I recognize them as those of my heritage, those of my grandfather, those of my mother they are Sharkey hands, small and soft yet capable of the most demanding task. They are the tools given to me from God to carve out my place in life.

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