The different ways to use a hook

To be honest, my story of loss isn’t one that belongs to me. It belongs to my father. By sheer consequence of being his daughter, his loss became my inheritance. And that inheritance of loss is what I am sharing today.

Safe to say, my relationship with my father is complex. For many reasons. But the central reason has always revolved around a metal hook.

In his college days fixing cars during summer breaks, my father lost his hand to the fan belt of a truck he was fixing up. He was just 19.

Stuck in the middle of the Great Canadian Plains, story goes that to get help he had to walk himself… and his severed hand one kilometre to the closest neighbours.

The minute he showed up on their porch, he fainted.

Shocked, the neighbours piled my father into their pickup and drove him an hour to the closest hospital. My father’s severed hand journeyed the ride with them, on ice, wrapped in a kitchen cloth.

When they finally arrived at the hospital, the doctor concluded that the hand was beyond hope to reattach. It simply had too many missing fingers and severed nerves. And so they sewed his wrist closed.

Since then, my father has sported a hook in place of hand.

A decade later when I was born, the hook was to have a fundamental impact on my upbringing. Whereas warmth and softness might have guided you as a growing child, I was led, always, by a cold metal upside-down question mark.

But if my father was sorry for his loss, he never showed it while we were growing up. In fact, you could almost say the direct opposite was true. He took pride in being different, unique, a conversation starter even.

And for the early years of my life, I was on the same page as him. The hook was just a hook. I remember curling my little fingers around it, letting it anchor me to my father as he’d trail me around the maze of the grocery store.

But then, something happened. I entered grade school. And suddenly, thanks to bullies and social convention, I became conscious of what things should and should not look like. And I began to surmise that my father’s hand should not look like that.

Admittedly, I was also perhaps bolstered by Steven Speilberg’s 1991 box office hit ‘Hook’. Unfortunate timing to say the least that just as I was becoming a typically self-conscious girl, this classic fairy tale villain suddenly underwent a renaissance and rose to the top ranks of villain-dome.

Trick-or-treating with my dad in the ’90s, well, that was always complicated.

So my response to all of this inner turmoil and insecurity was simple: I learned to hate the hook.

Suddenly, It was never talked about, looked at, or even touched. It just pierced the air around it like some raw element of the periodic table that was too complex to begin understanding.

But of course, my father didn’t have the same social pressures of making friends and fitting in with little girls, and so he continued to make his hook the oeuvre of every room and encounter.

Whenever he would come to pick me up from after-school volleyball practice he would stand as obviously as possible in front of my teammates and, in an effort to get my attention — as if I hadn’t already died the minute he walked in — he would begin waving his right arm, the hook arm.

Slowly.

Majestically.

Prosthetic extended high above his head. He stood proudly, as if cherishing it as a beacon guiding ships in the midst of a stormy night. Except here there were only ghastly stares of terrorised children.

And every time I would shrink a little more inside.

Believe it or not, though, the parents were always worse than the kids because like me, they pretended not to be bothered by It even while their faces contorted this way and that as he stood calling my name in his robotic hail. The kids at least were much more upfront about it.

Everywhere my father went, they would flock in awe of his hook. To them, he was the real deal, THE Captain Hook. A man of great power and weaponry only seen in fantasies.

And like a good spirited fantasy character, my father would play to their imaginations. He would open and close his metal claw for the kids to marvel at. Turn it this way and that to show its glorious curve in the gleam of lights.

They awed and wowed. Mouths agape, hands half reaching to touch, feet half ready to bolt.

My father would always conclude his show with the final act of stealing their noses. Except, unlike the joke where the dad with a soft, real human hand pretends his giant thumb is your little nose, my father’s grand-finale was more than anything a liability when the kids would realize, eyes wide, that the metal was real, that it was cold, and that my father — unable to sense the force of his elemental grasp — had firmly caught their noses in a trap that could in fact rip them from their faces should their feet speak for their hearts.

I always hated it when my dad did that joke. He didn’t understand the fine line that stood between awe and terror.

And as I grew into a young adolescent, his hook came to mortify me ever more. I never understood that it could have been a point of humour, or of conversation. I thought and expected that despite his traumatic, near-death experience my father should act and behave like every other normal dad made of 100% flesh. That’s especially why doing typically suburban family things with him made me squirm.

The worst moments were our casual dinners at Red Lobster. There was no such thing as sophistication at our outings. Like a true cave man my father had learned to use the brute force of his hook to crack open the seemingly indestructible shell of lobsters. Many waiters were left apologising profusely when they showed up later with crackers, only to find my father already snapping away at the meal in front of him like some modern-day Edward Scissor Hand. He used to say, in that way he was far more advanced than the rest of mankind. He had a highly functional left hand with a metal companion that could crack through crustaceans, saw through the turkey dinner, and pry apart the raw meat of steak into self-controlled portions.

When my sister or I would protest at his prosthetic slicing through our food, my father would always retort that his hook was way cleaner than the normal person’s right hand.

He’d look us deadpan in the eyes, smirk, and add, “‘Cause I use my left hand to wipe my ass.”

That was always enough to shut us up.

And after that rare moment spent acknowledging The Hook’s existence, we would go back to denial as It pinched a pile of fries to place beside the slab of meat he’d sliced for us on our plates.

Et voila, dinner was served.