The Things We Carry

Thirty thousand ACT-conquering words and one Estwing hammer.   Three thousand two hundred and forty two iTunes songs and eighteen sockets.  Two guitars and eight screwdrivers.  Colin’s picked the former, and I’ve picked the latter.  We’re creatures of habit and one of my habits is to send the progeny off to college with a toolbox.  In a place that celebrates creative, vocabularly-filled heads, having some blue-collar handiness doesn’t hurt. 

Dorm rooms are space efficient, so the toolbox has to be too.  I visit four stores before I find one just the right size.  Big enough for the collection I have in mind, but small enough to stow in the space available.  I imagine it’s like picking the right size turkey for Thanksgiving.  I’m always at the consuming end of that deal so I have no idea.  Four stores.  That is the most intensive shopping I’ve done since looking for a car.  I abhor shopping, except for cars, tools and ties. 

Just like with Amanda, the toolbox assembly is one of the last things I’ll have complete responsibility for before Colin crosses the welcome mat to his future at the University of Wisconsin.  Sheets, towels, toiletries?  File those with the turkey.  I’m no help there.  Tools?  Tools I know.  Thanks, Dad. 

Buy the best tools you can afford.  Skip a few meals if you have to.  Buy American tools whenever you can.  If some company invented it, buy it from them, not from someone else who stole their idea.  You can’t go wrong with Craftsman, they’ll replace broken tools decades after you bought them.  Dad had great advice about most anything, but tools most especially.  Our favorite times together were in the garage, building something. 

He’d smile if he saw me standing in front of the rack at Sears, scanning the choices.  He’d be proud of the care I take assembling the collection.  Pick up the tool.  Check its heft.  Look for weak points.  Imagine how it will fit in the bottom or top of the box with the other tools.  Is it space-efficient?  Is it strong?  Will it last?

Damn it, why did he have to die before I had to do this, alone?  Why couldn’t he have made it a few more years, and been there to see the kids head off to college, or maybe graduate?  He deserved to see that.  Three days before I took the cellphone call at a City Council meeting – a City Council meeting – that he had passed away, I was sitting next to him in his bed and he started to apologize.

He said he was sorry that he couldn’t … and I tried to stop him before he could finish, but I couldn’t.  He said he was sorry the tuberculosis which sent him to a sanitarium and my brother and me to an orphanage kept him for providing for the family as he wanted to, or playing catch.  I told him he had nothing to apologize for, and that he was the best father I could hope for.  Every small bit of resilience I have comes from him, as does every shortcoming of kindness I measure myself against.  He set the standard, and I trust he knew his grandchildren were well cared for in no small part because of the example he provided.

Pouring words into the kids’ heads at storytime?  I only hope my Go Dog Go renditions were half as playful as his.  Raising two musicians?  His jazz albums started it all.  Six foot three and blue eyes?  The genes weren’t bad either.

The toolbox won’t look like anything special.  But it will include a few of Dad’s tools, now handed down to his only grandson.  Carry them forward.  Use them well.