In the midst of stock taking and personal growth and mid life crisis and therapy, I cleaned out the garage of all our belongings and accumulated possessions. Our son is twenty four and we have been in the same house all these years. It was a lot of stuff.
Boxes of books. Boxes with receipts. Boxes with color polaroids and negatives in sleeves. A pumpkin costume that my wife sewed and our son wore on one of his first Halloween ventures in the neighborhood. (with us, of course) Camping gear: Backpacks and life vests and cross country skis and the boots to go with them. Fishing poles and reels and crazy tangled fishing line and lures in a torn plastic bag that I promised to go through one day and never did.
I was good for two hours max each day, going through the stuff, deciding which to keep and which to put aside for a garage sale. They brought back memories and feelings and the decision making about what to keep interfered with the feelings. I was exhausted after two hours of this emotional sorting.
Part of me wanted to sit down and relive the camping trip to the Weminouche and the potatoes we cubed and fried for breakfast and ate with oj and coffee and eggs. The skillet was there, still blackened from the campfire. The set-aside silverware and mugs were there in the bin we used for camping.
There was another part of me that was doing the ‘hard’ work. Letting go of the past and moving on. Making room for the new and all that rot. I did need more room in the garage because it was overfull and I was dividing the garage in two and making one half an art studio for myself. Necessity and stock taking had dovetailed in this enormous project.
Every day I would look at the mountain of stuff in the front yard and get tired. I plugged away at it for the better part of a month before I was done.
Yard sale day came. I went over all the stuff with my wife. She made suggestions. They were not her projects; the yard sale and the mid life crisis. I took everything next door where my neighbor was having his yard sale. We were combining. I gut checked with him on some old tools I was getting rid of. An old brace and bit set, an old hand plane, a folding tape measure. They were tools that my father had give me, that in turn, his father had given him.
I asked Eric, should I keep them? They are all I have of my father and of his father. There is nothing else. Should I keep them and give them to my son? Eric looked at me with benevolent, neighborly, good friend eyes and gently took the tools from my hands and put them on my truck seat away from the yard sale stuff.
I hadn’t dealt with those feelings. I had been running hard from my father and all he represented all these years.
There are no pictures of my father, mother, sister or relatives in my house. My parents lived in the same city as us when our son was growing up but they never babysat or took our son on trips. He never slept over at his grandparents house. My father kept me from his parents, I kept my son from my parents. I was not safe with my parents as a child. I did not feel my son would be safe with them. The sins of the fathers, they do live on.
Here I am at fifty five years of age, exorcising my past, eviscerating it and I am holding all that is left, tangibly of what my father gave me. And I do not want it, any part of it.
But, just maybe, it is not about me.
Perhaps there is someone who might care about having something that belonged to his father’s father’s father. My son. My beloved son, who does not feel what I do. I will keep these tools and give them to him and tell him the stories that go with them.
How when I was a child my father rebuilt the heads of the green 1950 Chevrolet sedan he owned with Jack, the master mechanic who lived three doors down from us on Eagle Street in San Francisco. How his father used the folding tape measure in work he did as a pipe fitter on the docks in San Francisco before World War Two. And, perhaps, how his father used the brace and bit to bore holes in the logs he used in his well drilling business.
No comments:
Post a Comment