Being out of work and semi-retired opens new opportunities that I had never expected. That includes spontaneity and the chance to be impulsive.  I can hear about a place I want to be and not have to immediately think about my job obligations.

So when I heard that President Barack Obama was coming to the Valley, I thought I would take the chance of seeing him, whatever the time or hour, in that place.  I expected it would be Veterans Memorial Coliseum or U.S. Airways Arena or Wells Fargo Arena, or even in an outdoors area.  On Sunday, when I learned it was Dobson High School in Mesa, I began to wonder what space availability would be like. After all, the school has a large enrollment and wouldn’t students alone fill the place?  On Facebook, I learned that tickets would be given out on Monday, but to get a ticket, one really needed to camp out Sunday night because “only 200 to 200 tickets would be distributed.”

It’s too cold on February nights to camp out.  So I got up at 3 a.m. Monday, put on two pairs of waffle long underwear, two pairs of socks, and four layers of shirts, then headed to Dobson.  Alas, a long line was already stretching along the north side of the parking lot. I was told to start beyond the driveway at the northwest corner of the parking lot. I put down my folding chair and turned on my flashlight and began the wait, accompanied by the book “Lies My Teacher Told Me” by James Loewen.  Soon someone came by putting numbers on our hands to try to prevent newcomers from infiltrating the line. I was No. 467.

I shivered through the wait, made friends with my neighbors and never expected to get a ticket. Krispy Kreme doughnuts were giving out by the boxes to the crowds  But we kept moving forward for literally hours after people started being sent by about 20 at a time to the school to register and get a ticket.  I got mine at 11:15 a.m.  I heard about 600 tickets were given out that morning.

Then it started all over to attend the event. I returned to Dobson about 4:45 a.m. Wednesday in advance of doors opening at 8:30 a.m. It was colder but I had three pairs of socks, two pairs of gloves and four layers under my suit and flag tie. Time went by relatively fast. I visited with so many I knew, especially my former colleagues at the Tribune who still have jobs and were reporting on and photographing the event.  The protesters, with the broad and varied messages, gave it a carnival atmosphere.  Jeers and shouts and counter protest gave color and drama to the scene. A Catholic Sun reporter was going to interview me, but when I gave him my name, he opted not to interview a known reporter, even if no longer one working the beat.

I went through the security when our time came and made my way in the the Dobson gym and took a seat on the floor well toward the back. In retrospect, I wished I had taken a bleacher seat or had wandered around the seats up front and found one not taken.  Everyone seemed armed with a picture cellphone and/or digital camera.  Through the long wait for Obama, people were constantly shooting photos and sending them off to family and friend.  Throughout the president’s speech, the camera flashes were nonstop.

Arizona politicians and public officials were everywhere, backslapping, networking, positioning themselves, standing and talking in the spotlights to be seen the hall.  Obama was as crisp and articulate of a speaker as always. He was on message and no-nonsense throughout. No town hall format, no jeers or wisecracks from the audience. It seemed over quickly.

President Obama is the seventh U.S. president I have seen in person:  1) Lyndon Johnson outside a Disciples of Christ church in downtown Washington, D.C., in 1966; 2) Richard Nixon campaigning in Urbandale, Iowa, in 1968; 3) Ronald Reagan speaking to us at the Kiwanis International Convention in 1987 in Washington, D.C.; 4) Bill Clinton outside of Gammage Auditorium in Tempe in 1996 while campaigning; 5) George W. Bush in June 1999 in Waterloo, Iowa, while campaigning, met him, talked with him, got his autograph and had a picture taken with him; 6) Gerald Ford on an airport cart in the Denver Airport in 2003; and 7) Barack Obama in Mesa.

It was 1958 when the simple song, “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands,” became a big hit, literally across the world. In America, Mahalia Jackson recorded it, and that led to its wider use as a song in just about every kind of setting, especially as a campfire and youth group song. It was ecumenical and applicable everywhere.

“He’s got you and me brother in his hands, he’s got you and my sister in his hands…” and so it went.  Very simple and no hidden message.  Recently, when I became part of those whose jobs were eliminated in the Tribune’s major downsizing and reinvention, I marveled at my own hands and how much they had done in 63 years of life and, especially, 45 years of pressing the keyboard in basic journalism. Those fingers tap the lettered keys that I almost never look at.  Of course, we have programmed it  with our brains through steady practice.  I can probably type 90 words a minute, but I have not tried to determine that for many years.

I would never suffer an accident that would break a bone, sprain a wrist or dislocate a shoulder, thus putting my craft as a writer out of action. I watched a good number of colleagues work around such injuries, improvising to work the typewriter or computer keyboard. My magnificent hands banged out millions of words on command. Since eighth grade when I first learned to type (I was required for all in my small Iowa school distict), I developed the proper typing techniques — not the hunt-and-peck method that some very veteran writers have used. One of my great prized possesions before computers was a Smith-Corona electric typewriter I purchased in an Army PX while in the Army in 1971. It would be such an important part of me for a couple decades.

I pounded on the keyboard a lot over these decades in both work, personal writing and lots of community projects, like reports and meeting minutes. Yet I never suffered carpal tunnel syndrome or related conditions that, for some, equired surgery, wrist supports or time off.

Of course, my hands — and your hands — have been summoned to do so much, that it defies making any kind of a master list.  As a boy, they carried so many rocks out of the Iowa dirt and droppedhem on a “stone boat” to be taken to fill driveway potholes on the farm. Or they washed cows’ udders to ready them for the chore of milking.. They pulled weeds, clasped twine on bales of hay or straw, drove hammers, wrapped around baseball bats, caught high flies, clasped books that took me all the way through college and graduate school. They shook the hands of Ted Kennedy, Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, George W. Bush, Shirley Temple Black and Ernie Banks, to name a few notables.  My hands got slivers out of my kids’ fingers, wiped tears from their eyes and their behinds, held them as they were rocked to sleep and to get them dressed so many times, and showed them ow to pray.  Now they do the same for grandchildren.

Not too many years after our marriage in 1973, it became impossible to get my wedding ring off my left hand because of a fattening finger, and so it has become a fixture there. I don’t think it will wear out and have to be replace.

My hands have been scraped in falls, bruised, caught in doors and bent backwards, but never enough to change my patterns.  I have generally small hands that carried callouses when I was a farm boy but no longer have  had the roughness of a working man’s hands.

On May 25, 1986, I led a group of about 80 people from my Tempe church to a milepost west of Phoenix on I-40 where we held hands and stretched out to form a link in “Hands Across America,” a grandiose idea to get people to form a human chain from America East Coast to the West Coast to raise awareness about hunger. There were never enough  people, so there were huge gaps.

Surely our hands are part of our greatest possessions that make us human. They hand us the chance to enjoy the most in life. Let’s give our hands a hand.