Thinking About... the Hand

Dear Son, a month ago I wrote a story all about how cheap I am. On that day, the first Tuesday of July, a handful of museums were free to enter and cheap me dragged the family around from free place to free place. In just a wink of the eye, another first Tuesday of the month had arrived so we made a free visit to one of the museums we didn't make it to last month. This summer off with you is passing way too quickly.
The Palace of the Legion of Honor is one of the two great art musuems in San Francisco. Affiliated with the de Young Museum in the Park, this one focuses more on classical art and painting. A copy of Rodin's Thinker greets you in the entrance courtyard and more sculpture awaits inside.
While all that Renaissance realism and medieval religious stuff put you to sleep, you perked up when you saw those dark, metalic Rodin sculptures again. You were especially drawn to a giant, body-less hand, open and reaching, rather grasping, for the sky.
Why did this hand interest you so much? It's size and shape? It's color? Or were you thinking in more symbolic terms? We didn't have to be the Thinker to come up with an answer. Art is often most interesting to an observer when he or she can find something in that particular piece that relates to his or her experience in some way. A hand may be the one thing that you can most relate to at this point in your life. It is in the past few weeks that you've really discovered your hands and now you are obsessively interested in their potential role in your life.
It is clear that your hands are no longer knobs at the end of your arms with which to bat things around. You now know that your hands have fingers with which you can grab and manipulate things. Your hands are your new passion: the freshest source of wonder and entertainment for you.
So, Rodin's giant hand, is an object of worship for you. Rodin was a smart man, you thought, to celebrate in his art the greatest thing on Earth: the human hand. What could be better, right? As your experience grows, you may change your mind but, come to think of it, why not idolize the human hand? It can be a symbol of our labor, our industrious nature, and the products of our minds and muscles.
When we got home, you fell asleep in your playpen following a long session of playing with and pulling at the toys and plastic rings hanging above your head. Just to let us know that your reverence for 'the hand' was not a passing fancy, even as you slept, you kept your hand raised, a couple fingers clinging longingly to the ring above, no doubt dreaming of that three-times life size hand at the museum.