Goltzius's Right Hand, Hendrick Goltzius, 1588
If you find yourself moved to write me about something, you may reasonably expect to get an answer. That isn’t likely to happen, though, and I’d like to tell you why.
Three or four years ago I woke up one morning, showered, dressed, gtabbed a cup of coffee and jumped in my car to go somewhere. That was when I discovered that overnight, without warning, my right hand had so enfeebled itself that I couldn’t turn the key in the ignition. The rest of my body seemed to be all right, so I reached over with my left hand to start the car, meaning to ask my doctor what the hell was going on this time at the next chance I got.
I will skip to the chase, omitting a year or so of talking to neurologists and neurosurgeons and being subjected to various high-tech tests. What’s going on appears to be a neurological problem. In order for my brain to tell my fingers to twist an ignition key — or do anything else — it has to send them a message through a nerve which passes along my spinal column. Unfortunately my cervical vertebrae have become so attached to those nerves that they’re squeezing them to death. So the messages don’t get through; lacking orders from above the muscles don’t do anything at all; lacking exercise they atrophy.
Fortunately for me, they take their time about it, but they’re pretty thorough. The fingers of my right hand are the worst affected so far. What makes that annoying is that I use that hand for writing. At least the first draft of a lot of my books was written by hand, with a ballpoint pen on lined yellow pads, often while on a train, plane or ship that was going somewhere. That option is no longer open to me, because my handwriting, always atrocious, is now often quite illegible even to me.
Remains the computer. That still works for me, but not easily. I can still touch-type with my left hand (in the old days at almost a hundred words a minute) but the right hand can only hunt-and-peck with the forefinger.
This is bad news. It’s horribly slow and prone to myriad mistakes, which I have to correct as I go along, and, worst of all, after a page or two my right index finger begins to get pretty painful. So my writing time, whether for books, letters or any other task, is limited. Therefore, at least until I finish a couple of things I really want to write, correspondence time is squeezed even harder than my cervical nerves.
And listen, this isn’t a plea for sympathy. Hey, I’m 89 years old. That means that I am far luckier than most of the people I’ve known in being still able to write at all — or, for that matter, to still be breathing. It’s just to say that if you ever happen to think you should properly have had a longer letter from me, or indeed any letter at all, it isn’t that I don’t treasure you, it’s just that my finger hurts.
