With the all the technology to make our jobs faster and easier, there are still so many that must be done by hand.  Aristotle said it best when he said, “the hand is the tool of tools.”   For those who like to work with their hands it seems to satisfy a primal need.  Turning disorder into order and raw into refined through their hands provides a feeling of accomplishment.  Could it be that the secret of joy in work is in the hands?  These four craftsmen, in their own right, would say yes.

The Pianist

By the time she was 11, Gabrielle Hildestad had taught herself to play the piano. To appreciate that is to understand what is involved: both hands playing together simultaneously while navigating 88 keys, playing up to 10 notes at a time. To manage that is amazing, when you think about it. 

Gabby plays up to 10 hours a week – teaching for the Acadiana Symphony Orchestra and the Conservatory’s DoReMe program, playing piano for St. Edmond Catholic Church, conducting private piano lessons, and teaching music to Pre-K 4 classes at Truman Montessori School in Lafayette.  Her hands are the “tools of her trade” and she cares for them with a daily massage.  To keep her fingers limber and agile, she practices every day, focusing on just one finger at a time, a piano exercise developed by the great 19^th Century Hungarian pianist and composer Franz Liszt.

Contrary to belief, strength is not as important as stamina in playing the piano, which is really required so the muscles can work longer when used repetitively.  The hands can become so well trained that they remember sequences of notes that the pianist can sometime forget – a phenomenon called “muscle memory.”

Another little known fact:  The motion of a pianist’s hands is in constant circles, which goes unnoticed by many – probably because we’re too distracted hearing the pianist’s fingers.

The Healing Touch Practitioner

It was while taking a continuing education class at UL in 1999, that Sue Heldenbrand witnessed the effectiveness of natural healing techniques through the laying of hands.  Since then, she has provided a combination of different healing modalities: healing touch, Reiki, integrative energy therapy, energetic trauma relief, through her business Synergistic Healing.

Her therapies help men, women and children – as young as six weeks – with many conditions including sleeplessness, migraines, depression, trauma, even ADD with the goal of returning balance to the body in support of our natural ability to heal.

After an initial briefing, the client lays face up on a massage-type bed in a serene room, fully clothed, while Sue slowly hovers her hands over the body, starting at the feet and ending over the head. There’s no talking during the hour-long session. The body will tell Sue if there are energetic blockages emotionally, spiritually and/or physically and her hands respond with a sensation of tingling, cold or often heat. Sometimes, she’ll break into a sweat. Her hands linger on a blocked area until she feels a balance in temperature, or experiences a feeling that only someone with her specific training can sense. For the clients, the release of emotions and toxins in their cells brings a relaxation. In fact, some have been known to fall asleep during the session.  

As a result, her patients feel lighter, less burdened and more balanced.  Now, that’s a gift.

The Surgeon

Perhaps no one has a better understanding and appreciation of the hand’s natural engineering than a surgeon. 

An orthopedic surgeon for 16 years, Dr. John Osborne not only appreciates the capabilities of his own surgical hands, but has a particular interest in caring for the hands of others because he sees their special purpose in so much of what we do.

Through the strangest arrangement of muscles in the body, the hands give us a powerful grip and yet allow us to pick up something as delicate as a needle.  The thumb is the most important finger, accounting for 40 percent of the hand’s capabilities, while the index finger is the least necessary finger.  Our fourth finger (the thumb being the first) is the weakest finger because the ligaments are not well separated from those on either side of it.

Treating broken fingers, lacerations, tendon and nerve injuries, is intricate, technical work that Dr. Osborne finds very satisfying.  With exceptional dexterity and smooth movements, his hands gently tease apart tissue, maneuver around the hand’s 27 bones and some of the densest areas of nerve endings in the body, and in the end skillfully knot thread barely thicker than human hair.  Some weeks, he performs up to six hand surgeries, lasting 20 minutes to three or more hours, depending on the complexity of the case.

While some surgeons are obsessive in avoiding injuries to their hands, Dr. Osborne takes just a couple of common sense precautions like wearing gloves while doing yard work and steering clear of broken glass.  

The Cooper

It’s an episode of “How It’s Made” that you wouldn’t want to miss:  coopering, the art of barrel making.  Or should I say, the dying art of barrel making.

For more than a century, McIlhenny Company barrel coopers have been recycling white oak barrels from whiskey distillers to ready them for aging Tabasco pepper mash. The barrels are retrofitted and reinforced to handle the acidic and spicy conditions of mash fermentation, replacing the iron hoops that bind the wooden staves together with stainless steel ones made on Avery Island.  It’s a craft that requires force and precision.   

Hamilton Polk was a master cooper at McIIhenny Company for 19 of his 41-year career before retiring.   Each day, using a hammer and hoop driver, he banged the daylights out of the metal into a circular shape with a trained eye and precision touch to ensure all the pieces came together to form a perfect, watertight seal.  Some days, he would reconstruct up to 25 barrels, each weighing 105-110 pounds. 

His hands grew accustomed to the pounding, but not to the feel of cold metal tools in the winter, which prompted him to wear gloves.  The rest of the time, Hamilton was proud that his work ethic and the skills of his craft were ingrained in his calloused hands. 

And, that’s what makes hands so interesting:  They can be telling not of the things we can do, but of the things that we DO, do.