This morning I woke up jabbing an old wound. It was all about the tools.
When we lived in Maryland on 2.57 acres back in the ’90s, I had every kind of tool there was. I had to have them, because of everything that needed doing. Our 80-year-old farmhouse was constantly rotting away or flapping in the breeze. The plumbing was half-dissolved from soft (acidic) water. Managing two and a half acres of woods and fields took implements I never thought I’d own. And I always fixed everything on our cars, short of actually rebuidling the engines. I could repair dents and weld stuff, too. I did it all.
Oh, those tools. Over the years I’d accumulated a fair number of antique items, mostly from my father and grandfather, all very sturdy and serviceable, of course. There was a small collection of pre-WWII vintage Japanese hand tools that my father had scrounged from Okinawa in ’48, things like a huge brace-and-bit, planes, files, and so on. I can’t tell you all the specialty items I’d picked up over the years, not to mention the usual electric power tools. I could weld, cut, glue, bolt, screw, pulverize, bend, polish, and paint anything that stood still and some things that wouldn’t. Pretty damned impressive, and beautiful too.
In ’99 we moved to Taos (55 years old, no home or real job at the other end, winging it all the way). During the heat and humidity of a Maryland summer, we packed up, gave away, or sold everything the two of us had ever called our own, including my wife’s tenured professorship and a house that appreciated less than one percent per year for the dozen years we owned it. (Read about the craziness here.) You probably can’t imagine how it felt to be following through on something so terrifying. Just writing that raises a ghastly silent howl and cramps my stomach. I don’t know how we did it. And all the packing took place under the gun, with the movers scheduled to arrive on such-and-such a date. The pressure was horrible.
I worked first on everything except the tools. When I finally came face to face with the physical challenge of packaging so much equipment, I more or less collapsed. There wasn’t anything I could do but sell the lot or give most things away. As a consolation and saving grace, I took an old wooden footlocker from my father’s Air Force days and filled it up with all the lovingly chosen special hand tools I could fit inside. It weighed as much as two refrigerators, and I could calculate roughly what transporting it to New Mexico would cost. I was scared to death about our finances — for good reason — and increasingly desperate as the moving date approached, so I called in a second-hand dealer who came by the house and started giving me money for things. “Five dollars for that?” he’d ask, and I’d nod. “Two for this?” Yeah, sure. Cash in the hand was what we needed, but I never planned what happened next:
“How much for that chest of tools?”
“Oh, I’m not selling those. That’s all going on the truck.”
“I’ll make you an offer on the whole thing…”
“How much?”
“Say fifty bucks?”
Rain was pouring down outside the garage. I was filthy, drenched with sweat, and ready to fall down and cry. Instead, I sold the chest.
Whenever I think of that, as I did this morning, a river of pain and guilt tugs at me inside my chest. How could I have ever done such a thing? I’ll buy new tools, I told myself at the time, little knowing it would be eight long years before we’d find ourselves in the black again. And yet, and yet…
In the eight years we’ve been here, we haven’t lived anywhere I could have stored that footlocker full of tools. What’s more, with just a couple exceptions, I haven’t needed any of the tools I gave away for pennies. And in fact, modest present circumstances or not, there’s nothing stopping me from buying any kind of tool I really need. Lord knows I don’t think twice about charging a couple hundred bucks for software or a hard drive. But I actually don’t need much in the way of implements now. Things are different. I’m not mowing two acres of grass every week or keeping up a mouldering Eastern Shore farmhouse. I did retain a few essential automotive tools, because you have to have a car, so all of that is fine, and I don’t do my own oil changes any more.
The truth is, nothing is really lacking in the present moment. Everything is fine. I’m here, I’m typing, I’m not hot or cold or hungry. Nothing needs immediate fixing in my physical environment. (Remodeling, maybe, or a bigger place to rent, but not tonight. Not even today.) And if I’d died before the movers came that sad and bitter morning, the goddamn footlocker full of tools wouldn’t have mattered even a whit. So what is it with the feelings that memory evokes?
One thing is that I haven’t let go of the past, though the past doesn’t exist outside of memory. (Show me, where is it?) Nothing but mental postcards, then, and how do you “let go” of a movie in your mind? But in a deeper place is somehing that wants recognition and release. The reason that the movie plays…
Maybe this came up because I haven’t allowed myself to grieve. It’s been too dangerous, you see — but now the danger’s on the other foot.
Related posts:
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Working with tools was once a pretty important part of your life and also happened to connect up with some of your family history (your father’s stuff from Okinawa and all). You would never have jettisoned those things except for the harsh circumstances you found yourself in at that moment, and you sound like you’re second-guessing yourself on account of it. Second-guessing is a part of all our stories. I carry baggage of that sort in my own memory. Sometimes I even “improve” on the pain of it by rerunning it and trying to make it work out some other way, which it never does. (Mark Twain said his memory was so good that it wouldn’t let things stay the way they were!)
So I was with you all the way, my friend, until you got to the end of your narrative and seemed to want to reject this memory of yours in some way. Maybe I got that wrong. Anyhow, I say, keep hanging on to it, keep regretting it (if necessary), keep thinking it through. Being a tool-user (you were far more adept than me) is part of your past and ought to be lovingly remembered. The story of how you sold off those tools under stress has a wonderful pathos about it – and no doubt a deeper meaning still at work in you. A wilful immunizing of yourself against what was about to become the Maryland past? Something similar happened to me ages ago in respect of a huge and lovingly assembled collection of baseball cards from the fifties. Still hurts he to think of how thoughtlessly I jettisoned that collection because I figured sometime in the mid sixties that I was never going to look at those cards again. It aint that easy. As Faulkner said, “the past is not over, it is not even past.” So true.
seemed to want to reject this memory of yours in some way
No, not at all.
Nothing is rejected, far from it. Immunizing doesn’t enter into the equation in the least and is in any case impossible unless you really mean “papered over.”
But what else does it mean to say “the past doesn’t really exist”? Surely that counts as rejection: It aint there. Nil, Zilch, Nada. Denial to the uttermost.
(Of course it really is there, inside you, which is the only place all this matters anyhow, which is what Faulkner’s paradoxical take on it was getting at.)
Better now anyway. Emotional charge transmuted into art, and all that.