The Toolbox in the Garage

Two weeks ago he asked me what the yellow tool was for. He was holding a tape measure. I told him and he nodded the way a person nods when a name comes back to him from a long distance, and then he set it down on the workbench and walked out of the garage without taking it with him. The workbench is a sheet of three-quarter plywood my father laid across two sawhorses in 1986.

The plywood has been resurfaced once, in 2003, after a gallon of stain went over. The sawhorses are original. He built them on a Saturday before I was born, out of two-by-fours and lag bolts, and they have outlasted three trucks, a marriage, and his own working memory of them. The toolbox sits at the south end of the bench.

It is a red Craftsman with a top chest and a rolling base, the kind they sold for thirty years before Sears finished collapsing. He bought it in pieces, the base first and then the chest a year later when the Christmas bonus came through. The drawers are labeled in his handwriting on strips of masking tape: SOCKETS METRIC, SOCKETS SAE, SQUARES, NAIL SETS, PLANES. The tape has yellowed to the color of old teeth.

The handwriting is his from before, when his letters still closed properly and the S in SOCKETS leaned forward like a man about to start walking. He does not open the drawers now. He looks at them. He was a contractor for forty years.

He started as a carpenter’s helper in 1974, the summer after he finished at the community college, and by 1981 he had his own crew and a truck with his name on the door, in vinyl letters my mother applied herself with a squeegee and a hairdryer. He built houses in subdivisions outside Rockford, additions and decks and a few light-commercial jobs, an insurance office on East State, a dental practice in Loves Park. The dental office is still there. I drove past it last fall when I was home, and the soffit detail he was proud of, the little reveal that catches the shadow and makes the fascia look thinner than it is, that detail is still working.

He could look at a framed wall and tell you what was wrong with it from across the room. He could hear a saw blade dulling. He kept a pencil behind his right ear and another in his shirt pocket, because the one behind the ear got lost a couple of times a day. He sharpened the pencils with a utility knife, not a sharpener, and he sharpened them to a long flat point so the line would be consistent on rough lumber.

I watched him do this maybe ten thousand times before I understood it was a craft inside the craft. The thing is, none of this is what I want to write about. What I want to write about is the toolbox, and what is in the toolbox, and what he does and does not do with it now. But I cannot get to the toolbox without going through the man, and the man is harder to get to than he used to be.

The diagnosis came in October of 2021. Mild cognitive impairment, the doctor said, with a likelihood of progression. My mother called me from the parking lot of the clinic before she drove him home. She said the word “likelihood” twice.

She said the doctor had asked him to draw a clock and he had drawn a circle with the numbers all crowded on the right side, like they were trying to get out a door. He was seventy-three. He had retired four years earlier, not because he wanted to but because his knees were finished and his shoulder would not lift a sheet of OSB anymore. For those four years he had worked on the house.

He replaced the kitchen cabinets. He rebuilt the back deck. He put in a new circuit for the dryer when the old one started tripping. He did these things slowly, more slowly than he used to, but he did them, and when I came home for Christmas in 2019 he showed me a dovetail he had cut by hand for a small box he was making for my mother, and the dovetail was tight and even and you could not see the line where the pieces met.

By Christmas 2021 he had been working on a built-in bookcase in the front room for six months. The carcass was done. The face frame was clamped up on the workbench. He could not remember where he had put the shelf pins.

We found them in the freezer, in a sandwich bag, behind a package of ground beef. He has good days. On the good days he can still tell me the difference between a rip blade and a crosscut blade and why you would use one and not the other. He can name the parts of a hand plane.

He picks up a chisel and his thumb finds the bevel without his eyes being involved. The body remembers what the mind has begun to misplace, and there is a stretch in the late morning, after his coffee and before lunch, when he is almost himself, and we can stand in the garage together and he will say something like, you want to keep the cord behind you when you cut, and I will say, I know, Dad, you taught me, and he will look pleased and a little surprised, as though he had not known he taught me anything. On the bad days he does not come out to the garage. He sits in the recliner and watches the weather channel with the sound off.

My mother brings him tea. He drinks half of it and forgets the rest, and the tea goes cold on the side table next to a stack of unread Fine Homebuilding magazines that he subscribed to for thirty years and has not opened in eighteen months. What I keep coming back to is the way he looks at the tools now. Not with confusion, exactly.

With a kind of mild courtesy, the way you look at someone whose name you should know but cannot place, and you nod, and you smile, and you hope they will say something that gives it away. The first time I noticed something was wrong was earlier than the diagnosis. It was the summer of 2020, and he was trying to install a new garbage disposal under the kitchen sink. I was there, home for a long weekend in the middle of the pandemic, and I was sitting at the kitchen table reading a book about the Mesabi Range.

He had the old disposal off. He had the new one out of the box. He was holding the mounting ring and he was turning it in his hands, and he said, quietly, more to himself than to me, “Which way does this go.”

He had installed probably four hundred garbage disposals in his career. Maybe more. The mounting ring goes one way. It is not a question.

I got up and came over and looked at it with him, and I said, the gasket goes up, the ring goes under, and he said, right, right, of course, and he did it, and it worked, and we never spoke about it. But I went back to the table and I could not read my book anymore, because I had heard something in his voice that I had not heard before, which was the sound of a man looking at his own hands and not recognizing what they were holding. The toolbox has six drawers in the top chest and five in the rolling base. I have been through all of them in the last year, slowly, on visits, when he is napping and my mother is at the grocery store.

I am not looking for anything. I am taking an inventory I have not been asked to take. Top drawer: combination wrenches, SAE, 1/4 through 1 inch, all Craftsman, all original, all with his initials scratched into the handle in case one walked off a jobsite. Second drawer: combination wrenches, metric, less worn, bought later when the imported lumber and the imported appliances started showing up.

Third drawer: sockets, 3/8 drive, in a plastic tray that has cracked along one edge and been repaired with epoxy. Fourth drawer: sockets, 1/2 drive, mostly impact sockets, blackened. Fifth drawer: screwdrivers, arranged by size, the Phillips heads ground down and resharpened with a file because he believed, correctly, that a fresh Phillips tip is the difference between a clean drive and a stripped screw. Sixth drawer: chisels, in a wooden rack he made himself out of poplar, the chisels honed to a mirror, the rack stained with linseed oil that has gone tacky in the corners.

In the rolling base: planes, hand saws, layout tools, a Stanley 92 shoulder plane in its original cardboard box, a pair of marking gauges he made out of cherry scraps, a small toolbox-within-the-toolbox containing nothing but pencils, sharpened, ready, untouched for two years. I close the drawers carefully when I am done. I align the toolbox with the edge of the bench the way he aligned it. I do not move anything.

I am not ready to be the person who moves anything. He fell in March. Not a bad fall, my mother said on the phone, but a fall. He had been in the garage.

He had been looking for something. He could not say what. He had pulled a stepladder over to reach the high shelves where he keeps, kept, the lesser-used tools, the dado set, the doweling jig, the router bits in their wooden case. He had climbed two steps and lost his balance and gone down sideways into the lawnmower.

He bruised a rib and scraped his forearm. He did not break anything. The doctor said he was lucky and my mother said he was not allowed on the stepladder anymore, and he agreed, in the moment, the way he agrees to most things now, with a small nod and a slightly absent look, as though the agreement were being made by a version of himself standing just behind his shoulder. He went out to the garage the next morning and tried to climb the stepladder again.

My mother heard him and came running. He was on the first step and he had forgotten, in the eight hours since the conversation, that he had agreed to anything. This is the part that catches me. Not the fall.

The forgetting of the promise not to fall again. The way a single night could erase a decision that had taken a doctor and a wife and a bruised rib to produce. On a Wednesday in April, I flew home for four days. I had told my mother I was coming to help her with the taxes and to look at the gutters, but really I was coming to see him, because she had said on the phone, two weeks earlier, that he was slipping faster than she had expected, and I had heard in her voice the thing I had heard in his voice in 2020, which is the sound of someone watching a familiar room rearrange itself in the dark.

He knew me when I walked in. That was the first thing I checked, and I am ashamed of how quickly I checked it. He stood up from the recliner and he said my name and he hugged me, and his arms were thinner than I remembered, and he smelled like the same aftershave he has worn since 1992, a green bottle of something from the drugstore, and for a second the whole house was the same house it had been when I was twelve. On the second morning we went out to the garage.

He wanted to show me something. He could not remember what. We stood there for a while, in the cold, looking at the bench and the toolbox and the unfinished bookcase face frame, which was still clamped, still waiting, the clamps probably ruining the wood by now from the prolonged pressure. He walked over to the toolbox and put his hand on the top of it, the way a man might put his hand on the shoulder of an old friend, and he said, “I used to know where everything was in here.”

I said, “You still do, Dad. It’s all still here.”

He said, “That’s not the same thing.”

He was right. It is not the same thing. The tools are where he put them. The knowledge of where he put them is somewhere else now, in a place neither of us can reach, and the toolbox has become, without anyone deciding it should, a kind of memorial to a man who is still alive and standing next to it.

I have been thinking about what tools are for. I do not mean this in a grand way. I mean it specifically. A chisel is for paring wood.

A square is for checking ninety degrees. A plane is for flattening a surface. The functions are simple and they have been simple for four hundred years, and the tools in my father’s toolbox would have been recognizable, most of them, to a carpenter in 1850, and the gestures required to use them would have been the same gestures. What the tools are not for is remembering.

They do not contain memory. They contain only their own shape and their own edge, and the memory of how to use them lives in the person, in the hand and the eye and the part of the brain that translates between them, and when that part of the brain begins to thin, the tools do not thin with it. They sit on the bench. They wait.

They are perfectly willing to be used. They do not know that the man who used them has begun to forget their names. To put it less politely, the tools are fine. The man is not.

My mother asked me, on the last night of the visit, what we should do with the toolbox. She asked it carefully, the way she asks all the hard questions now, in the kitchen, after he has gone to bed, with the dishwasher running so the sound covers the conversation. She said she did not mean now. She meant eventually.

She meant when. She did not say when what. I said I did not know. She said, “He would want you to have it.”

I said, “I know.”

She said, “But you live in an apartment.”

I said, “I know.”

We sat at the kitchen table for a while and did not say anything else. The dishwasher finished its cycle and clicked over to dry, and the house got quiet in the way it gets quiet only in houses where one person has gone to bed and the other people are trying not to wake him. I thought about my apartment in Iowa City. I thought about the closet where I keep a small canvas bag with a hammer, two screwdrivers, an adjustable wrench, and a tape measure I bought at the Ace on Gilbert Street for nine dollars.

I thought about the fact that I have never in my adult life owned a workbench, or a sawhorse, or a chisel, or a hand plane, and that I have made my living arranging words on a screen, which is a thing my father respects but has never fully understood, in the way I respect but have never fully understood what he did with his hands for forty years. The toolbox weighs probably four hundred pounds, loaded. It would not fit in my apartment. It would not fit in any apartment I have ever lived in.

It belongs in a garage, on a concrete floor, near a workbench made of three-quarter plywood laid across two sawhorses my father built before I was born. He came out to the garage with me on the last morning. It was early. My mother was still asleep.

He had his coffee in the green mug he has used for as long as I can remember, the one with the chip on the rim that he refuses to throw out. He sat on the metal stool next to the bench and watched me look at the bookcase face frame. I asked him if I should take the clamps off. He looked at the face frame for a long time.

I could see him working at it. I could see him trying to assemble, from the parts available to him that morning, the answer to a question he would have answered in two seconds, ten years ago, without looking up from his coffee. He said, “I think the glue is set.”

I said, “I think so too.”

He said, “Take them off slow. Sometimes a clamp leaves a mark.”

He had not lost it. He had only had to walk a longer way to get to it. I took the clamps off, one at a time, slowly, the way he said. The glue was set.

There were no marks. The face frame was straight and tight and ready to be attached to the carcass, which was sitting against the wall under a drop cloth, waiting for a man who might or might not be available to finish it. He watched me stack the clamps on the bench. He nodded once.

He said, “That’s good work.”

I had not done anything. I had only released the pressure on a joint he had cut and glued months earlier. But he said it the way he used to say it to his crew, with a small finality, a signing-off, and I took the compliment because I am not too proud to take a compliment from my father about work I did not do, and because I knew, standing there in the cold garage with my hand on the bench he built, that I might not get many more of them. He went back inside.

I stayed in the garage for another half hour. I looked at the toolbox. I looked at the labels on the drawers, the masking tape, the handwriting from before. I looked at the pencils in the small box, sharpened, ready, untouched.

I took one of the pencils. I do not know why. I did not ask anyone. I put it in my coat pocket and I have it now, on the desk where I am writing this, and the point is still sharp, still long and flat the way he sharpened them, and the lead is still black and ready.

I have not used the pencil. I do not think I will. It is not the kind of pencil you use. It is the kind of pencil you keep, in a drawer or a coat pocket, where you can find it on a morning when you need to remember something specific about a man who is still alive and who is forgetting, slowly, in a house outside Rockford, the names of the tools he used for forty years to build the rooms other people live in.

The toolbox is still in the garage. The bench is still there. The sawhorses he built before I was born are still holding the bench up. The bookcase face frame is leaning against the wall now, unclamped, finished, waiting.

He is sitting in the recliner. The weather channel is on. The sound is off.