My Father's Fingers

As a young boy, I experienced a dreaded family ritual that I expected every time I brought a new friend home for dinner. I knew it was coming as soon as I saw my father at the head of the table begin to raise his fingers in the form of a Churchill/Nixon V for Victory sign.

"You kids had better eat your vegetables or else Mrs. Stoffa will do this to you!" he'd say smiling and laughing and nodding towards his hand. My friends would shriek in horror, fascination and delight as their eyes darted from his fingers to my mother scooping out applesauce. If anyone had been looking at me, which they never were at this point, they would have seen my eyes rolling to the back of my head.

"John, stop that. Kids, don't pay any attention to him," my mother would say to my friends as they viewed and touched the famed fingers up close, asking questions about how they got that way.

My father often pokes fun at his fingers in social and even professional situations, but few people know the backstory of how they got that way, (with the exception of a number of 40 year old friends of mine that had the pleasure of eating at our home back in the mid 70s.)

In 1947 when John Stoffa was eight years old, he and his older brother George were working a tripod cornstalk cutter that wielded a sharp blade that came down on the stalks that the operator pushed towards the blade. My grandfather let his 8 and 10 year old sons work this machine unsupervised while he was doing other farmwork.

Somehow my father pushed a cornstalk too far and down came the blade. Just little boys, they panicked and the fingers were lost somewhere in a nearby pig pen and never found again. My dad was rushed to Coaldale Hospital, but the real trauma was that in his childish ignorance, he did not realize that he had any hopes of surviving. While his older sisters wrapped the bleeding fingers in cloth and my grandfather drove through red lights, my father calmly waited to die, not saying anything to anybody. It wasn't until he was in the hospital being prepared for a operation on his hand that he realized that you don't automatically die from severed fingers.

As a child I thought he was torturing my friends with his dinner joke. Now as an adult I realize he was actually a lot smarter than I thought. The kids were bound to notice the fingers sooner or later and might have been uncomfortable, distracted, or scared had he said nothing or talked about the fingers in a serious tone. What better way to put them at ease than to use humor and let them ask questions to learn more?

John Stoffa embraced his physical imperfection using humor. The "Mrs. Stoffa will cut your fingers off if you don't eat your vegetables" joke that made my friends shriek and laugh in horror and glee back in the 70s is only one of many finger jokes in his repetoire. He's got a million of 'em.