Everything Will Wear Down One Day

 

You know those things that need to be done, and yet you keep putting them off? But they niggle away at you, in the dusty corners of your mind.

I checked some of those things off that list recently:

-          Get my mammogram done. You probably don’t want to read about that.

-          A long overdue eye exam

-          Get my fingerprint search done. Yes, you read that right.

As part of my job, I periodically need to get my fingerprints taken for a criminal record search. So there – you have assurance that your faithful blogger is a law-abiding citizen. But you knew that already, didn’t you? I may have episodes of crankiness, or rant occasionally at my fellow citizens. But I’m a rule-follower by nature. Occasionally I’ve been known to jay-walk, but that’s the extent of my rule-breaking.

At the OPP centre, two lovely officers, one male, the other female, lined me up at the machine to take my prints. The female officer pressed my fingers to the glass over and over, but the machine kept responding that the scans weren’t good quality. What was the issue? Was it the machine or was it me?

A list of reasons dropped down for the male officer (good-looking let me say, just as an aside, apropos of nothing) to indicate why the scan couldn’t be accepted.

One of these reasons was something like: Can’t get good quality prints due to age.

“You’re not going to check that age reason, are you?” I asked the officer, only half-joking.

“No, never.” He smiled at me.

We’re never too old to flirt, not even with good-looking police officers.

He checked “Other” as a reason, and the female officer kept trying my fingers again.

“Do you use your hands a lot?”  the male officer asked.

“I’m at a keyboard all day. I play tennis and pickleball. So yes, I use my hands a lot.” Dishwashing and household chores didn’t even occur to me.

After about twenty minutes of trying both hands, the machine still responding that it was not getting good quality scans, they were eventually satisfied with the ones obtained. Off I went.

I have no idea what the lesson is here.

Don’t use your hands too much?  Don’t wash loads of dishes or swim too often? Don’t grip a racquet too frequently, or pound daily on the keyboard, because…your fingerprints may wear down? And if they do, then what? Is there some other part of our bodies by which we can be uniquely identified that can be used for criminal background checks? Scan our eyes? Our tongues? What about our toes? Although I suppose those would wear down faster than fingers. I have not yet looked at the underside of my toes.

We know that as we age, parts of the miracle that is our body, wear down, cartilage between joints erode. Part of aging is this ‘erasure’ of sorts – from society, from the workplace, from women’s magazines and articles, from ads aimed towards youth. We’re encouraged to erase the lines from our faces with ‘anti-aging’ creams. (How I dislike that term. Like we should be waging a war against aging, when we all know what the alternative to aging is).  But I’d never thought of our fingerprints being erased. Those markers that uniquely distinguish us.  On the outside. One doesn’t get older without knowing that what truly makes us unique is on the inside, but sometimes that bears repeating.

How many fingerprints have been sacrificed to typing out this blog post? I have no idea, but I intend to keep on blogging and writing.