Of the thousand thousand things my husband saved and left behind
there remain precious few relics hidden here and there in random rooms
for and of the fifteen years his never forgotten father lived after
proudly holding his firstborn and only son in early April of 1939
The son who grew up in Metuchen, New Jersey, a typical teenager with a
stay at home mother, two sisters, a hard working immigrant father from
whom he inherited high cholesterol, an outlandish love of butter, eating meat
and potatoes, reading, and having the right tool for every task
He did not inherit his father's perfect slanted sloping old school
penmanship nor his father's precise manner of placing and spacing
family photographs posed and candid, time captured with the handing down of
old cameras, both still and moving, lenses and cases now boxed with
monogrammed cigarette lighters, initialed cuff links, vintage tie tacks,
old keys to old doors somewhere, small leather notebooks half written in
with dried out pens from the past, once important envelopes carefully slit open
postmarked, saved with penny stamps and dead presidents canceled by
love letters bundled, thin cotton blue baby clothes from the 1940s,
drafting tools and mechanical pencils, a metal measuring tape,
an unsafe cast iron fan with dubious wiring which still whirs and
whispers when plugged in above the family radio with the magic eye
that could not foresee the father's sudden heart attack and death,
changing a flat tire on the shoulder of a back road alone at age forty,
born in Germany but buried in Cleveland, Ohio nearby both parents and
more than his whole lifetime later joined by his wife's ashes
So when newer fans needed a few drops of oil after hours of cleaning
on a humid day in May many years hence, our firstborn son says
you need the old oil can and I know exactly which one he means and
the cabinet where it waits in dented grime, his father's father's half full oil can
Today is not the first day I take note of my son's distinctive hands putting
the fan parts back together deftly using a Phillips head screwdriver, the yellow
and black handle turning as a version of my own time slows to a shimmer
showing how he has inherited his father's hands to the very nails and bones