Child Labor laws notwithstanding, my dad made us all work in the shop from a very early age. Sometimes it was good fun- learning to melt the wax and playing with tiny Austrian Crystals were things any child would enjoy. Other times it was not so fun, but we survived.
My right ring finger, however, almost didn’t.
The year was 1991. I was thirteen, in my first semester of full homeschooling, and my dad had found a great advantage to his daughters not being away at school for 7 hours a day: he could have us help out in the store nearly full time.
I would come to work with him in the morning, my hair up in a banana comb most days. We would park in back of the little strip mall on Speedway Boulevard in Tucson, unlock the massive steel back door, and settle in for the day. Those were, more often than not, fairly pleasant days. It was before my dad went truly insane, and we would sit for hours doing mass production on the huge quantities of silver rings that soon would sell at the Renaissance Faires. We’d play the classical radio station, listening to hours of violin music and NPR babble. Around 3pm, when that inevitable sugar slump hits most adults, Dad would dig a couple of bucks out of the till and send me next door for a frozen yogurt, topped with two squirts of hot fudge sauce.
One day began like most others, with bright Arizona sun angling in the windows of the little narrow store, wonderful smells emanating from the Jewish bagel shop across the road, and a constant parade of college students wanting their silver chains soldered and Fossil watch batteries changed. I had helped dad size a round or two of waxes for casting, and he was on one of his endless phone calls, probably to someone he owed money to.
Bored, and always on the prowl for a project, I wandered into the back room of the shop. The polishing lathe sat there, gleaming cadet blue under a thin layer of black spinoff dust. I had used it many times before, always on simple rings or pendants. Why not, I wondered, just polish all of my jewelry? Get some good practice, make my stuff look nice… simple enough of a concept.
What I forgot, whether deliberately or accidentally I shall never remember, was Dad’s warning about polishing chains: “That thing will rip your finger off!” You see, the polishing lathe has two speeds, and I think we always use the highest: 3,700 RPMs. That, my friends, is wicked fast. The arbor moves so fast that if something touches it, the friction causes immediate heat. It also moves too fast for reflexes. So you can probably understand how dangerous it was for me to polish a fairly substantial silver chain.
There I was, humming along while I worked. I held the chain firmly between each thumb forefinger, something I know now is dumb. As I would move the quarter-inch wide silver links under the swiftly rotating wheel, the waxy rouge would make contact with the metal, removing the finest layer from the top, revealing a finer, smoother surface below the minute scratches and dings. But then something went wrong. The chain was about eighteen inches long. I held about four inches of it at any given time, and there were probably a couple more inches looped around my fingers. This left several inches just dangling down in the polishing shroud. Several inches that, in a nanosecond, wrapped around the three inch muslin wheel, caught on the arbor of the machine, and somehow simultaneously hooked the tip of my right ring finger.
Normally, the machine makes a pleasant hum while it runs, due to the powerful motor inside of the metal housing. Stick a figurative monkey wrench in the works, however, and it kind of hiccups. The RPMs temporarily stop, or drop down to 2 or 3, and then it basically eats whatever has gotten in its way and goes about its merry business. That ‘ERRR-Gunk-URRR-whunk’ sound was made as I lost the entire top half of my fingernail. Somehow, my normally dull reflexes were able to snap into place quick enough for me to extricate my finger. Or maybe it was that the chain disintegrated into multitudes of tiny, rolling links. The sound that several dozen little silver rings make as they hit a steel shroud at 70 miles an hour is also impressive.
I switched the machine off and stifled a scream. If my dad knew that I had been messing around with the machine, I’d have been in trouble! As it was, I wasn’t able to hide my mangled fingertip from him, not with all of the bleeding and crying. He chewed me out while he scrounged up the First Aid kit (regular bandaids weren’t doing the job), I gathered up what was left of my chain (there was enough intact to make a bracelet!) and I got out of dish duty for a couple of days.
My finger took weeks to heal. The top half of the nail was gone, and I eventually lost the bottom half as well. The fingertip was wrenched to one side, and healed ever so slightly crooked, but there is no scarring. The human body is an amazing thing. So is the human brain. It tends to learn lessons. I now polish chains, if at all, on a wooden spindle, with no dangle.
