Besides a droopy eye and crooked smile, my grandpa Jack Gianotti, Sr, had another distinguishing characteristic. He was missing part of his middle finger, down to the second knuckle. Memory fails to recall which hand, but I guess it makes little difference since he still had seven other good, well-functioning fingers and two perfectly good thumbs. I didn’t know anyone else who had that missing appendage. But that all begs a question for a young boy like me: What happened?

The thought of having a finger lopped off, no matter how it happened, intrigued me. So far as I knew, Grandpa could have been born that way, but that is not how this story turns out. Of course, I thought some about how painful it must be to have one’s finger cut off. Thinking about it caused my butt to tighten up (I was somewhere in my pre-teen years and wasn’t embarrassed to talk like that then). But no matter how bad or painful it must have been, my grandpa didn’t seem too bothered by not having half of that appendage. He acted like it was normal, and after all, didn’t all grandpas have something or other that made them different, unique, special in the eyes of a grandson?

The missing finger, though, was symbolic to me. I wouldn’t have put it in such erudite terms back then, but there was just this unarticulated assumption about Grandpa. The half-finger represented his bravery and toughness. He was a man’s man and could handle pain with no problem. That’s what I wanted to be when I grew up.

So how did he lose the finger? Was this a war injury from World War I, where his rifle was blown out of his hand, along with his trigger finger? No, of course not; that would have been his index finger, not the one cut off. Did he fall off a cliff, holding on with just one finger for hours, which finger then had to be later amputated? No. Was Grandpa in the process of winning a knife-throwing competition, and the knife ricocheted all the way back to him, clean-cutting his finger off at the knuckle? Nope.

Often we look at our misfortunes, trying to find the cause, laying the blame, or asking “Why?” or “Why me, Lord?” Sometimes we lose something important in life, and we think we cannot possibly go on. But when God removes something from our life, He has made us so marvelously that we can adapt and compensate for the loss, whether physically, as with my grandpa losing a finger, or emotionally, as with the loss of a loved one. God will be there to help us.

Grandpa lost his finger while helping move a piano—it got caught between the instrument and a wall. That’s it, and it’s all I know. But it was one of the distinctive and obvious characteristics of a truly unique man who was a mover and shaker. I apologize for anyone expecting a more fascinating cause of his finger loss, but isn’t life just like that, filled with the mundane? In the eyes of a child, even the mundane becomes significant. More so with God.