As a kid, I was a fingerprint junkie. Once I learned that every person had unique prints, I studied mine intently with my magnifying glass and “Finger Inker” kit (fun to say with a Swedish accent).
It became one of many afterschool activities I enjoyed with my neighborhood friend, Andy. When you were as lousy in sports as we were, weird hobbies were good for filling that time when more athletic friends were engaged in football or basketball. When one of those friends broke his arm playing football, we shanghaied him into our fingerprint club. He was so bored that I am sure we hastened his astonishingly fast return to left tackle.
But Andy and I remained mesmerized by our hobby. We even became Indianapolis’ first detectives to branch out into paw inkings, luring our dog, Bobo, to my room and ensuring her cooperation with her favorite Milk Bone biscuits. That branch closed immediately when my mother noticed Bobo curled up for a nap on my pillow, with purple paw prints all over my bedspread.
I graduated to handprint and footprint interest by the early 1960’s while watching Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood honor movie stars by inviting them to place their signature, handprints, and footprints in wet cement outside the theater. This soon expanded to other types of prints as well. I especially enjoyed newsreels of Roy Rogers’ horse, Trigger, having his hoofprint immortalized (our Bobo was the pioneer in that particular four-legged field), and later Whoopi Goldberg’s dreadlocks and the Harry Potter wands cast in the cement.
One unfortunate starlet of the silent-movie era disgraced herself as the news cameras rolled live, by falling forward as she pressed her hands in the wet cement and sinking her knees into the mucky gunk as well. She was so humiliated that she never came back for a second attempt and instead left the movie industry, returning home to Nebraska.
Her daughter, in an interview given after this once promising starlet died in poverty and obscurity a few years later, mourned the fact that her mother’s public disgrace ruined her life. She believed that if her mother had only returned to create a perfect set of prints, her movie career would have gone on to rival the reputations of the biggest stars of the day.
My take on it is quite different. I am convinced that her mother would have become even more beloved if she had only insisted that Mr. Grauman keep her cement block exactly as it was, knee-prints and all. Who doesn’t love to read of our favorite stars being as human in their real lives as we are? The press would pay paparazzi thousands of dollars for a shot of Liz Taylor at the grocery or Brad Pitt on a bad hair day.
The point is that what unites us 8.2 billion humans on earth is not our imperfections but instead our common struggles trying to cope with all our human foibles. When I was a boy, I was enthralled by how each of us has a unique fingerprint. Now I am more impressed with how each of us shares certain poignant, mortal frailties — the most common of all being our inevitable, unsought end.
As opposed to the jaunty footprints that movie stars left at Grauman’s, today we tend to use the term “human footprint” to refer to the measurable impact we each have on the environment. Anthropologists tell us that there have been 109 billion people who have left their human footprint before us and have now passed away. Within about one hundred years, almost all of us eight billion living today will have done the same.
While we still can, we might embrace that beautiful sentiment Dickens expressed in A Christmas Carol. He was referring to Christmas, the one time “when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely and to think of people above and below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.” Let’s make all days, not just Christmas, be days when we leave our tender and loving fingerprints on all who share our lives.
Elliot says: many of you have asked to see a photo of me during the school years about which I often write. Here I am at age 12, around the age Andy and I were during our detective years. I am pretty sure my school was holding "ugly shirt day" when this photo was taken!
Email Elliot at huffam@me.com or click here