Monday, January 8, 2024

Dainty Digits

My job affords me many many hours alone.  In the beginning, I was left with only my thoughts to entertain me while I drove riders around the city, but soon, I got myself a speaker to alleviate the boredom and borderline insanity.  Soon I found myself enthralled with the radio personalities of our fair city and maybe a year after that I began to overstep my reservations about calling in to the radio stations.  Making phone calls has always been a huge phobia for me.  Nothing overwhelming that would cause me to cower in the corner of a room, muttering gibberish to myself.  It's just that, in the past I've had experiences where people call me from questionable places.  Subject for another time, perhaps.

In my repeated calls in to the radio station, something I do semi-regular, is because they always have a subject that I can weigh in on and today was no different.  However, I was too busy to make a call, so instead I decided to simply write my thoughts and memories down.

Sully, one of the afternoon radio personalities, was confronted by his co-host, Whitney, about his shiny fingernails.  "They're reflecting the sun and blinding me." I believe she said, or something to that effect.  Sully, often the brunt of many jokes because of his naivete to life in Saskatchewan.  Sully is from Vancouver and as much as one would believe that there isn't much of a difference in lifestyles in each province, Sully proves otherwise.  So when Whitney addressed Sully's fingernail situation, Sully never backtracked.  He leapt forward with a logical response.

Sully's daughter wanted her daddy to take her for a mani-pedi and had him get his nails done, too.  I apologize for not having all the facts as to what lead up to his taking his daughter for the spa date, but suffice it to say, 'That's a good dad.'.  I texted in to the show to say as much, adding a memory that had returned to me as a result of his touching story.


When I was a kid and my sister was even younger than that, I recall my dad laying lazily on the sofa, watching television.  He had come home from work, exhausted, which is why he'd fall in and out of sleep.  My sister had asked if she could file and trim his nails and being the loving father that he was, he obliged.

The tender touch my sister's little hands and fingers had on my father's aching feet must have been to trick he needed to send him soaring into dreamland.  She gave my dad the full treatment.  Lotion and everything.

The next day my dad came home with a story to tell.  My dad worked as a heavy duty mechanic with the Potash Mine of Saskatchewan.  After a hard sweaty and hot shift working underground, he and his co-workers were hitting the showers when his buddies all noticed his toe nails.  All ten were a vibrant pink colour.  He quickly explained to the lot of them that his daughter, my sister, had been playing and must have painted his toes when he was asleep.

That was half true, she did, in fact, paint his nails, but he knew that she was mucking about down there while he was asleep.  He wasn't angry, although my sister, if memory serves, was a little uncertain when my dad was retelling the story.   He wasn't.  In fact, he got a good laugh out of it, adding that he'd thought she was just doing the clipping and filing.  Never in a million years, did he ever suspect that she'd doll his tootsies up like one of her Barbie's. 




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