My Late Father — Tool-Lover Supreme | old swimmer ( Same Ol’Swimmer) on WordPress.com
Judy and I enjoy a swim the summer were putting up 3 Americas! 2001
From my very good friend, Judy Wray, I got this email reference..sent just for me to enjoy!
H. O. Studley Masonic Tool Chest <click on this link to see amazing tool box
Judy asked if I got it, and I replied by email. Judy responded by saying I should post the following to my blog. I hope others enjoy the story of my father and his special love of tools. And his love of me! …
I WROTE:
Yes, indeed, I did look at the fabulous tool chest, and then I forwarded it to my son David. He will love it too.
The look of tool chests can tell us much about workers and workplaces. While their purpose is to organize, carry, and protect tools, this chest also suggests what a worker thinks of himself and how society measures the value of his work.
One does wonder, though, whether someone who works from a tightly packed chest like that puts the tools away each time they are used and then “finds” them again, or whether, maybe, there is an occasional moment of “mess” on the workbench with a lot of chaos and tools here and there while something is being made.
I recognize the special devotion to the tools, and I get it from my father, who spent much more time designing places for all his tools in his basement workshop than he spent using said tools. It is one of my pungent memories, all those leather pockets for a zillion specific awls, and bits, and gears and calipers and files, (on and on and on) that he kept and showed me how to use.
I was about four when I first learned about nails and hammers, and how not to hit your fingers. Also about what I called (to his delight) “hole nails.” These were screws, of course, with the slot in the head for turning…but they were “hole nails” for a time back in those days.
He had an old post office fixture at the end with maybe 150 cubbyholes into which he fitted wood cigar boxes labeled things like WASHERS and FINISH NAILS and POLISHING WHEELS and JUNK. I loved to go through them all and see what was what. Always very carefully and with the joyful oversight of my Dad who called me “Shorty” (because we were a duo and I was the short one.)
My Dad was a semi-reclusive guy (and I am like him often, in this way) who loved to tuck himself into his armchair with the foot stool, with his big supply of cigarettes and Scotch and his newspaper and hunker down for hours with TV running sports, or news, or westerns. The livingroom was always stuffy with the layer of second-hand smoke. My children later would come make swirls in the smoke layer. (their poor lungs). No cigarettes or Scotch in my environment now, thank goodness!
He was one of my best friends, although he and I had philosophical differences, and some pretty touchy issues that we disagreed vehemently about. We were open-faced with each other, and did a lot of “admitting/confessing” and apologizing between us over the years.
By the time he died on December 14 in 1979, I had done my serious grieving, pretty much daily, while watching him slowly run down in a local nursing home. He was a double amputee (both legs) and blind(Diabetic rhetinopathy) during those years…and used to say he was “one of the lucky ones” simply because he got a visit each day, and most of the others in that nursing home got no visitors ever at all.
My mother and I visited him, one of us at least, each day to feed him dinner, and to bring him his prescribed dose of one daily Scotch and Soda. (His empathetic doctor had carefully written that out as an order, reasoning that “what did he have to lose?”)
When he closed his eyes the last time, I told him to “go find Jesus, and He’ll show you the way.” A tear came down, through his coma, and I took that to mean either that he DID IT, or that he was frustrated by my last ditch effort to get him to believe. I won’t know til I get there.
But I whispered to him…”Dad, this is what you wanted for Christmas…rest and go.” And he did.
That night we had planned for the whole family (my five and my mother) to go to the Pacific NW Ballet’s Nutcracker. We asked ourselves what we should do. We decided we would be missing Dad no matter where we were sitting, and that he would say…go to the ballet! So we did. What a night. I remember, it was Maurice Sendak’s fabulous costumes and sets, and the ballet was wonderful. One of the children in the ballet was a neighbor of ours. Dad would have been delighted…but he would have sat out the event and preferred to nestle down in his chair with his smokes and his drink and his paper. He would have looked up with a smile and a cocked eyebrow as we came back, and asked, “Well, Shorty, how was the ballet?”
I was blessed with some really fine people in my life. I am so grateful.
Originally published at oldswimmer.wordpress.com on January 3, 2012.
