I grew up in historic northeast Minneapolis, Minnesota in a blue-collar environment. I studied my mom's hands as she hung clothes and rolled dough for pierogi. I watched with a five-year-old's fascination our next door neighbor's hands as she used her ax to decapitate a hen for dinner. And even as a kid I sensed that my family's welfare depended upon my dad's ability to use those strong hands of his to shovel coal into the boiler of a Soo Line steam engine. The folks in my neighborhood survived by working with their hands. This probably was the beginning of my fascination with them.