Middle Finger

            A few years after I started my new life in America, my father finally got his visa to come to see us. Knowing how much my Dad likes to see new things, I got on the road. Driving once on I-70 with a decent speed through the downtown area, I didn’t pay too much attention to my father’s gestures. He was thrilled as a kid, looking to the left and to the right.

“What is this, what is that?” I’ve heard him asking. I was unable to answer, because my eyes caught a sight of something wild: the man in the next car pointed his middle finger at me. I pushed on the gas, leaving his ugly finger far behind.

“What have I done?” No one has ever pointed a middle finger at me before.  I was just so proud of my driving to impress my father!

“What is that?” My Dad was already looking at something else.  Luckily, he was too busy to notice what was going on outside the car.  I wouldn’t be able to stand his criticism. Again, I hadn’t even gotten a chance to answer. Someone was honking this time on my Dad’s side of the car. 

“What did I do wrong this time?” I was very close to having a panic attack, seeing another huge middle finger pointed at me. 

“Oh, my daughter is popular here!” My father claimed proudly.

“No, Dad. This is not what you think.”

It was almost surreal. Something was really going wrong on that highway. I saw those middle fingers pointing at me, passing me by at a tremendous speed; I couldn’t understand at first how one of those insulting fingers managed to get so close to me in my own car and stayed. Then it occurred to me that there was an out-of-the-ordinary connection between my Dad’s sightseeing questions and the other drivers’ middle fingers pointed at us. “Oh, my! This is my own father’s middle finger!” I almost slammed on the brake remembering his way to point at things.

My Dad grew up being taught that it was rude to point at things with one’s index finger. To point with an index finger was impolite, inappropriate, and disgusting. My father created his own unique way to avoid the problem: he pointed at different things with his short middle finger, instead.  He used to teach at the university and not having a pointer handy, sometimes, he used his middle finger to get his students’ attention to the important numbers on the board. His gesture was very natural.

“Dad! Do not point with your middle finger at anything here.” My commandment sounded more like begging. “We will end up in real trouble. We can die on the road!” Driving faster and faster, I tried to think of how I could explain the richness of “the middle finger” symbolism to my father, if we had never even watched a single R-rated movie together? “Dad, this is just a real insult here in America. Next time you see something, use your index finger instead, please.” 

“My index finger? Never!!! Only over my dead body!” Well, now it was my father who was insulted. 

For seventy years of his life, he believed that it was not permitted, approved, nor ever allowed to use his index finger. It was taboo. “Dad, let me explain it to you at home.” My Dad turned his face away from me and kept silence for the rest of the trip. He withdrew from the sparkly world of the Plaza Christmas lights. I took the joy from my father to be himself; he didn’t care about sightseeing anymore. “The middle finger” symbolism was not an easy thing for both of us to explain or comprehend. It was my time now to try to find the right words.

My Dad’s middle finger was so domineering that it seemed to have a life of its own, while his index finger was habitually lazy and disinterested in what was going on. It was something in my father’s brain that was fixed forever. But I underestimated my Dad. After I developed the pictures of my Dad’s visit, I noticed a shocking difference with my Dad’s traditional way of posing. Before, traveling abroad, he was as always standing in front of a monument or historic building, pointing at them with his middle finger.

“Julia, Paul, look!” I called my children to look at the newly developed pictures of my father’s visit. “Your grandfather developed a new gesture! Look, he looks like a monument himself, stretching his right arm with the palm looking up.” I knew I saw this exact gesture somewhere before so many times that it hurt.

Finally, I remembered Lenin’s monuments on each central square in every small town or big city in Russia.

“Guys, I finally got it! Who knows, maybe Lenin had to force himself to invent this gesture, too?  After all, he was a world traveler as well!” I forgot that little Paul knew almost nothing about Lenin and had to explain to him the humorous symbolism behind having an identical statue of Lenin on every main square all over the country, usually facing the City Hall. People joked about the way Lenin was staring at the communist headquarter, “I have to always be on alert to watch over those guys,” pointing right at the building with the high steeple.