A personal essay, mapped

What He Kept

The first Saturday

My father's garage had one working light, a bare bulb on a pull chain that he had wired himself in 1987 and never touched again. You pulled the chain and waited. Then the whole room came up at once: the workbench, the pegboard with the outline of every tool drawn around it in marker, the shelves of coffee cans, the lawnmower that had not started since the Clinton administration. My sister stood in the doorway with a roll of contractor bags and said we had until Sunday night. The buyers wanted the keys on Monday.

We started with what was obviously trash. That took an hour, filled four bags, and taught us exactly the wrong lesson, which was that most of this would be easy. The coffee cans were not easy. Each one held a single category of hardware, sorted by a man who believed in categories: wood screws by length, machine screws by thread, washers, cotter pins, one can of nothing but the small brass rings that come off the ends of lamp cords. He had labelled them in pencil on masking tape. The tape had gone the colour of weak tea.

I kept one can. I did not tell her which.

The lawnmower was the first argument. She wanted it on the curb; I wanted to see if it would start, which it would not, and which I knew. I pulled the cord six times anyway. On the seventh the smell of old fuel came up out of it like a Saturday from 1994, and I let her put it on the curb, and a man in a van took it within the hour.

By noon we had a system. Anything with his handwriting on it went into a box by the door, for deciding later. Anything that still worked went to the curb under a sign that said FREE, and by two o'clock the neighbourhood had taken the bench grinder, the extension ladder, and a sledgehammer neither of us could lift. Everything else went in the truck. The truck went to the dump twice before dark, and on the second trip my sister drove while I sat with a box of his drill bits on my knees because there was nowhere else to put it.

The middle shelves

The second day was the shelves along the back wall, and that is where the work changed. These were not tools. They were the things he had kept because keeping was easier than deciding: tax returns from the seventies, an outboard motor for a boat he sold before I was born, a box of my mother's letters that we both saw and neither of us opened.

It is hard to say what it means to keep things like that. There is a sense in which objects hold meaning, and a sense in which the meaning is really something we bring to them, and it is perhaps not always clear which is which. In some ways the garage was a kind of record, and in other ways it was more of a reflection of who he was as a person. It was, in a sense, his way of holding on to the things that mattered to him. Keeping things was how he dealt with what was important. It seems like it might be the case that most people do something similar, at least to some extent, though it is probably not really possible to say for certain. Our neighbour across the street has been restoring a motorcycle in his driveway for the better part of a decade. The weather that weekend was unseasonably warm for October.

What broke the spell was the motor. My sister found a receipt taped to its housing, dated July 1979, for a rebuild he had paid a man forty dollars to do, and under the receipt, in his pencil, a note: runs rough, don't sell. He had kept a thing he knew was broken because he had written down that it was broken. That was the whole system. We put the motor in the truck. She kept the note.

What went in the truck

By Sunday afternoon the room was mostly floor. We had not seen the floor in thirty years. It was painted grey, and in front of the workbench there was a pale oval where the paint had worn through to concrete, which was where he had stood. I stood in it. It fit. My sister took a picture of me there, and then a picture of the pegboard with its marker outlines, every shape now empty: a hammer-shaped gap, a saw-shaped gap, a gap the shape of a tool neither of us could name.

We kept three things apart from the box by the door:

the pencil note from the motor

the can of brass rings

a tape measure that only went to twelve feet, which he had used anyway

The tape measure was my sister's idea. She said he had measured every board in the house with it, and if the house was still standing then twelve feet was evidently enough. I could not argue with that. I have stopped trying to argue with that.

The buyers came Monday with a contractor, who looked up at the one bulb and said he would have to redo all of it. He was right. My father had known that too. It was on a list, in pencil, on the back of a seed packet pinned to the pegboard under the words things to fix, and he had crossed off the three items above it over a span of eleven years. The light was next. It had been next for a while.

I drove home with the can of brass rings on the passenger seat. It rattled on the turns. Somewhere around the state line I understood that I did not want them for lamp cords; I had never in my life repaired a lamp cord. I wanted the handwriting. I wanted to be the kind of person who had a can for that.