“I don’t know why I keep licking my finger to turn the page on my tablet,” the choral director murmured, and I thought: Why are you licking your finger at all?
During the Covid-19 pandemic people were made aware of Locard’s principle of transfer, something that I read about in one of my murder/mystery novels. Dr. Edmond Locard (1877-1966) “was a pioneer in forensic science,” and posited that “Every contact leaves a trace.” When two people meet and brush against each other, there will be an exchange. This exchange can be of hair, fibers, or cootie. A humorous post on social media during the pandemic noted that people were frustrated because they could not lick their fingers to open the plastic bags in the grocery store. A friend and I were used to exchanging hugs of greeting and goodbye, but we soon developed the “Covid-Hug:” We bumped elbows when we parted.
I have never been a finger licker; when in the grocery store, if the two parts of the plastic bag will not separate, I go to the vegetable section and wet my finger with moisture from the green onions. When I was a young artist, my hands were always grimy with graphite, paint, clay, and acetone. I was constantly washing my hands, so much so that it irritated my cruel father; he once forced me to immerse my hands in a bucket of oil drained from an automobile as a way of teaching me that real men have nasty hands.
My youngest granddaughter has a bad finger-licking habit. I constantly caution her: “Take your finger out of your mouth.” I have a video of her when she was about two years old, and she was climbing the stairs from my basement bedroom. I can be heard in the background, guiding, and encouraging her; the whole moment went sideways when she turned around to look at me, stuck out her tongue, and gave the handrail a swiping lick. “Gack!” I exclaimed; “Now I have to wash the WHOLE BABY!” Despite my many admonitions, Myah will not keep her fingers out of her mouth, fingers that have touched all the possible gack in the world.
I am a Covid-Cowboy; I always have a squirt gun full of anti-bacterial hand sanitizer. The men’s room at the downtown Indianapolis bus transit station – recently, at least – has neither soap nor towels for our hands. The electric hand dryer is non-functional. Which makes my personal packet of hand-cleaning materials very important to me. I believe that I may have commented before, on the lack of concern that many men show for clean hands. I remember being in the “john,” and a man commenting: “You must be a surgeon, the way you’re going after those hands.” I was merely being thorough, as is my wont in a filthy men’s room: We men are pigs.
My first daughter used to drill her two children before turning them loose at a rest stop: “What do we touch in the restroom?” Xavion and Imani would dutifully answer: “Nothing but the toilet paper!” Their cousin Myah has yet to absorb that lesson, which is why her mother and I are on constant finger-watch. I let Myah read a part of this screed, and when she read of licking fingers and turning pages, she told me, with 7 ½ year old gravity, that the principal of her school licks her fingers and turns pages as she reads to the children. As I struggled to find an appropriate response to that information, Myah calmly told me: “She’s the PRINCIPAL.”
Take that, Colonel.
cjon3acd@att.net