Last fall, I sat with a group of men at a hunting camp and after a meal and drinks, I posed a simple question: if you could reclaim something you’ve lost in life, what would it be?
These were heady men. Serious men. Easy to joke, but able to rise to the moment. And the things they missed in life ran deep. I didn’t like my answer at the time so offer this instead …
I want the smell of my grandfather’s garage back. Oil and cut wood; sweat and turpentine; a dirt floor with the sweet tang of wet leaves after a hard rain. I would spend hours there, watching him clumsily fix things with wire, nails, and a stream of Ukrainian curses. Master of no trade but life, he could cobble together most anything (including actual cobbling on my boots) with the most rudimentary of tools. He showed me how everything could be broken down into a few simple parts and once you understood those you could repair anything. One time, I pointed out a few leftover pieces after he assembled a radio, but he dismissed them with a wave of his hand as they were clearly not needed. The radio worked fine for another 20 years.
He taught me to piss into a jar as the bathroom in the house was too far away and I finally found out what all those yellow bottles on the shelf were.
We wouldn’t talk much, so we developed a quiet language of him holding out his hand and me placing the correct tool in it. I discovered that a hammer is useful in almost every situation as you can always bang something together, so usually it was the old claw hammer that I passed to him. I still have that hammer. Rehung of course.
The garage door was blocked with stacked boxes, so the only light came from the side door and a tiny window up high. There was so much dust in the air that the window was a searchlight illuminating the dark corners as it moved across the room through the day.
After an early dinner, we would sit by the garage door and drink tea as the sun dropped and the room became a warm dark blanket. I would fall asleep in my chair and my grandfather would carry me to the house, pull off my shoes and slide me into my bed where I would dream, comforted under the weight of blankets made heavy with my grandparents’ love.
That’s the lost thing I would want back.
