Happy day George,
A long, long time ago, when the grass was greener, the sun more sunny and the water more wet, there was a boy named Jerry. And as the legend goes, when Jerry was 5 years old or so, he and his older brother were cutting wood out in the yard and through a possibly freak accident with an axe, a portion of the middle finger was lopped off. After a fair amount of commotion and fuss, and this being in the olden days, the finger could not be re-attached, although the legend is silent as to whether it was ever found or if it indeed became a snack for a passing raven.
But time passed as it does, and the boy grew up with the missing portion kinda...well...just always to have been missing. Jerry did as other boys did, scampering around through those early years of life, until one day he became interested in playing guitar. And wouldn't you know it, but the missing piece turned out to be not so missing after all, for if you know much of youngsters and their body parts, it takes a while to get them all going more or less the same direction, and at least this finger wasn't going to be part of the problem. After a spell, it became part of an interesting solution.
The boy evolved and his guitar skills grew, and he played a bit of this and a bit of that, learning as best he could until he set off on his own and made his own way into the world. He developed his own sound, the finger stub playing the missing note that defined the others before and aft. Along with some friends they created a musical genre, and played the world over, plying the people with his brand of the muse. Eventually his life gave way to the legend, and the music never stopped, and the band keeps playing on.
No legend is complete without an icon, a shape or a symbol, and even if there was one that was all-encompassing, what with a picture being worth a thousand words or so (not adjusted for inflation), sometimes just one isn't enough. So this handprint has become part of the story of the life that was and the music that was crafted by none other than Jerry Garcia.
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