Old Man’s Workshop
Tuesday, May 19th, 2009
Scrawled on the mailbox side over the metal rivulets was the old man’s last name. Though it belonged to a long lineage of back-broken men and sad women, the broad blood-colored paint strokes of his own making on display at the end of the driveway made the name belong to only him, and not even to the grandkids who sometimes watched him work.
He’d painted it on a Saturday morning in a half-lit garage, where he did all his building and fixing, that smelled like 100 year-old limestone sweat and oily work tools. He had sturdy hands, his fingers calloused and often bandaged. Sometimes there were open sours smeared with some red first aid goop that his grandsons thought particular to old wisened men from another generation. They’d watch him in the narrow tool shed next to the garage sharpen lawn mower blades standing in shooting orange sparks, his face not changing. The boys, if they were older by another five years, might have seen him as the composite of the concentration and the lostness of old age, but instead saw him as still. His work was done in quiet, repaid with a handshake from a neighbor happy to mow again or a smile from a little boy grateful to have a bicycle tire patched, and when he was done, he was usually hungry.
Retired some 20 years, he took up work where he could find it – in the garage and his garden in the back or the apple tree that shaded it partly from a day’s summer heat. His gardening amounted to little more than fresher tomatoes for the people around him or under-done watermelons. For him, there were no better meals – nothing really, except the work.
There wasn’t the glory from the major repairs he’d done on the belts and the rotors of the assembly line at Colgate. Retirees from the company got a turkey on Thanksgiving and a ham on Christmas ham, for free, and it was the most important part to his year, every year, aside from complaining about the city’s professional baseball, including the big-salaried players he could immitate and always despised. About Easter, he’d tell the boys he’d be buying the ham himself.
They cared not as much about the food as he did, but it was different than shop talk, which they didn’t understand. Their parents were divorced when the youngest was in elementary school and the older boy in junior high, and there was no tool box in the house. They’d been left behind by their father – their grandfather’s son – and raised in a house where their provocative mother hammered nails with high heeled shoes and hired out anything that couldn’t be touched up with a screwdriver – or it was left broken until the grandfather found it not working. Their mother never wanted to impose on him.
He’d remade their front porch stoop, repaired a CD player – a decive he’d never seen and did not understand, but still made it sing and wail. He was a craftsmen above all and his biggest fix it job was showing the boys and their mother that there was something respectable in the family name, even if his own son had let him down.
