Short Story: Tool Time

Short Story: Tool Time

I had a meltdown last week over a power tool.

The meltdown shouldn't have been surprising. For the past thirty years I've noticed that the first week in October is always the worst for me in terms of emotional troughs and existential despair. I'm sure there's a serious "waning daylight" issue going on. It always passes, with a few days and a lot of chocolate.

What triggered it was a tool that worked just as it was supposed to.

What brought me temporarily to the point of tears, however, was that I knew how to use it. Go figure.

I was in the midst of sanding some storm windows before starting to paint them. There was a week of splendid painting weather, warm and sunny and dry, and the windows, with their white paint turned a dingy, peeling grey, needed attention before the fierce travails of winter. A shop vac would be involved, of course, to vacuum the paint chips and dust. I own one. It looks like a sinister cousin of the annoyingly cute Star Wars droid, R2-D2. But what had brought me to the hardware store and ultimately to the meltdown a few days later was the purchase of a palm sander and a detail sander.

I bought cheap, as usual. My store brand cordless drill has worked just fine for the past several years and I saw no reason to invest large sums of money in small tools I didn't expect to use much. But somewhere along the line in the next couple of days of sanding and painting, my ambivalence toward my new sanders turned to horror. And when my friend Judy called to say hello one morning, I hit a flashpoint and then dissolved. Doing my own windows had been the tipping point in a march toward self-sufficiency that seemed, on that bright October morning in a day that would be just a little shorter than the day before, both symbolic and lonely. I finally hung up, wiped my nose, and went outside to paint some more.

The man of my dreams, who was tied up busily painting his own storm windows and trim during this stretch of idyllic weather, did his best to point out that (1) he would love to learn how to use a sewing machine and wouldn't feel his masculinity threatened if he did, and (2) on a self-sufficiency scale, my chainsaw was a whole lot more symbolic than a detail sander.

Well, yes. He was right on both counts.

But on the other hand, I could milk the subjects of the chain saw and the cordless drill for a lot of light cocktail party banter while dressed in stilettos and chiffon and dangly earrings. There was just something about owing a detail sander that bespoke renting space in the "small engines" department of the local Tennies Ace Hardware store, pulling up a stool at the counter, and debating the finer points of lawn tractor hydraulics. The place is very, very manly. It smells like oil and metal parts and gas and testosterone. A nice place to visit, but I always feel like I've landed briefly on another planet.

I kept brooding darkly on the subject for a full week.

Then, yesterday, I found myself back in Chicago at the two-flat which had been owned by my godmother and which was about to be sold. I was there to inventory the things that remained and to help my mother pack up for moving. And so I spent part of the day in my father's work rooms in the basement, poring over the contents, looking to see if there was anything I wanted to bring home with me.

This place had not been my home. I had lived there for less than a year as a teenager before we picked up stakes and moved to an abandoned farm hundreds of miles away. I spent another year there after high school living with my aunt and my grandparents, while I worked and took a few classes and contemplated starting college full-time. I lived there again for a single summer while in college, working as a legal secretary by day and training my horse at a stable on the edge of town in the evenings.

It was always a transitory destination for me.

But my parents had lived there for the past thirty years. And a lot of stuff could build up in a man's work space in that amount of time.

I had not been able to spend much time with my father during those years. Time and distance played a part, family dynamics played another. But I knew all that time that he loved me, and that he was proud of me.

I approached the work rooms with a mixture of curiosity and salvage on my mind. There were jars upon jars of used nuts and bolts, screws and nails, drill bits and routers, washers and grinding wheels. Things were stored in coffee cans and boxes, on shelves and on the floor. My mother had been in a wheelchair for most of the past ten years, and so she wouldn't have had much to do with things in the basement. I don't know if the hoarding was a product of my father's mental confusion in his final years, or just a by-product of the privations endured as a P.O.W. during and after World War II. But he had worked as an airplane mechanic in Germany during the war, and had worked a succession of factory machine jobs in the U.S., and he would have loved the smell and the feel of the "small engines" department in the hardware store.

Here and there were things I recognized. I rounded up as many drill bits as I could find. I didn't know if they would fit my cordless drill, but I could always figure that out later. Some of them were incredibly tiny, others were enormous. There was one drill bit that was very short, but with a diameter that looked like it was made for cutting woodpecker holes in dead trees. I took a couple of hand saws, and a box of wooden kitchen matches. An antique oil can, rusted on the outside but still workable. I tipped it over and pushed on the bottom. A drop of oil squirted on to the workbench. I'll clean it up and it will sit as a sentimental decoration in my garage. If the Tin Woodsman from the Wizard of Oz ever comes for tea and feels a little stiff, I'll be ready.

High on a shelf in one of the rooms were a couple of Good Housekeeping magazines, more than twenty years old. I pulled them down, wondering what these icons of femininity were doing in such a place. They were strangely two copies of the same issue. When I read the index, I knew. I had written an article about the dog that adopted me when we were up on the farm, and this was the issue of the magazine it had run in. I looked back at myself from the pages, black and white pictures of a much younger version of me cozied up with my two young daughters and the friendly brown-and-white dog with one blue eye. It was my first national by-line, and I smiled. The magazines went into the "take with me" box.

I took a leather "Bell & Howell" camera bag, stiff with age. I have his old camera somewhere in my home. A Craftsman folding metal ruler, and a pair of wire cutters. Along the line of spending time with the man of my dreams, I've learned that Craftsman tools are something of a big deal, not only because of quality but because they come with a lifetime guarantee.

And then I found the capstone to this journey through time--my father's Craftsman electric drill. It was heavy, with a steel casing and thick rubber cord, and a tiny drill bit still in position. It looked nothing like a drill today. It had something of that modern "futuristic" look of the giant robot in the original black-and-white version of "The Day the Earth Stood Still" with Michael Rennie and Patricia Neal. Lifetime guarantee? Ha! I thought. If this thing ever needed parts, customer service would be sending away to a museum.

Pressed for time, I didn't try it out, but just took it instead and went upstairs to pack some china. Whether it worked or not, I didn't care. I felt somehow closer to the man who used to try to teach me how to change a tire when I was sixteen, though at the time I never committed the instructions to memory. Now I can just call for road service on my cell phone.

I plugged the drill in this morning and pulled the trigger. It roared to life with a scream much larger than its size would imply. I smiled and coiled up the cord, and placed it carefully on a shelf in my new workbench in the garage, next to the palm sander. I will be my father's daughter. And I will quit pouting over the fact that I know what a socket wrench is. Because I brought home the wrench... and all the sockets I could find too.

Mary T. Wagner is the award-winning author of "Running with Stilettos: Living a Balanced Life on Dangerous Shoes" and "Heck on Heels: Still Balancing on Shoes, Love & Chocolate!" This story first appeared on her website, www.runningwithstilettos.com