Since my father died just shy of his 80th birthday, I’ve visited his grave only a few times. My mother finds comfort in sitting on the nearby granite bench, listening to the small planes come and go from a nearby airport and communing with her husband of more than half a century. But for me, the memory of burying his ashes in that place remains too close, too raw.
Instead, when I travel to Jacksonville, the Florida city where he started a small business and built a home along the St. John’s River, I find my father in the places where he lived, in the things he once touched.
In the five and a half years since his death, I have followed a quiet ritual when I travel south for a visit. I hug my mom and catch up on the latest news, then uncap a beer and walk to the wooden dock on the river. There, I knew, Dad had spent hours watching the dolphins cavort in the briny water, admiring the cargo ships lumbering off toward another continent, and tinkering with his boat.
We spent some of our best hours on that red and white runabout. Sometimes he would tow me and the grandkids on skis or an inflatable tube, mischief in his eyes as he cut corners while pushing the throttle hard. In quieter hours, he and I would head to the sawgrass flats just to the north, quelling the engine and listening to the plash of fish breaking the surface.
My other ritual was a private one. While other family members watched football on TV or swapped stories about the cousins, I would slip into the garage and walk to the workbench on the far wall. There, I found the collection of tools my father had built from the time he was a boy growing up on a southern Missouri farm, the tools he had taught me to wield as I followed him into adulthood.
Here, the small oil can still smeared with his fingertips. There, a wood-handled saw with teeth yielding to rust. Rolls of duct tape, bags of spare socket wrench pieces, coil after coil of extension cords. And off to the side, a tool chest that had, for me, become a drawer full of memory.
On my trips south, I found solace in sliding open the drawers of that tool chest and taking on the small jobs my father would have handled. Taking a screwdriver in hand to tighten a door for my mom, I could imagine the warmth of his fingers, the certainty of his grip. I was never as handy as he, but he always tried to be a patient teacher. Sometimes, after he was gone and I was working on a project, I found myself whispering, “How am I doing, Pop?”
On a trip this month, I needed to pull a dead battery from the boat, so I headed into the garage to find a wrench. But I found the garage wall empty, the tool chest nowhere to be found. I walked into the kitchen to ask my mother about it, and she said it had been sold at a family garage sale. The news hit me like a wave, and I began to cry as hard as I had on the day we buried my dad.
My first impulse was to be angry; how dare anyone sell my father’s beloved tool chest? But it didn’t take me long to realize that it was beloved mostly to me, that it had become a way back to the days when we would pass silent hours together, bruising our knuckles on the unyielding steel of a small engine, trying not to curse in each other’s presence.
Greedily, perhaps, I had not told my mother, sister, wife or kids about the importance of my trips to that tool chest. I wanted those moments to myself, just as I had wanted those moments with him when he was alive. There was no reason not to sell that box, except for the one I harbored.
This grief, I realized, was mine alone.
Mom smiled and told me that she had made sure to save out some of the wrenches before the tool chest was sold. I took one, wiped a hand across my face and headed to the dock to bring that battery back to life.•
