What I Want To Say About My Father - Jackie Davis-Martin

My father gave me a tool box to take to college. He assembled it himself, selected and packed the hammers, screwdrivers, pliers, the screws and tacks and nails I might need, even levels and an adze. Most of the tools had my initials carved in their handles, because my initials were his initials, a fact that I loved telling people. I'm telling it now, forty or so years later.

The tools had been selected and culled from the workbench he'd built himself in the back of the garage. The wooden work surface was rimmed along the back wall with Maxwell House coffee cans. These held old hinges or rusty nails or other pieces of metal—scraps he had salvaged that “might come in handy” sometime. Above these, attached to a wooden ledge, hung lids of mustard jars screwed into the wood, the scrubbed glass containers screwed into them displaying nails of various sizes. Vises and grips and drills served as bookends more or less to the workspace; hammers and mallets and cleavers and the like hung from wooden slings my father had made solely to serve as homes for them. Screwdrivers rented like pen quills in holes drilled in little platforms just for them. A shelf under the workbench held bigger machines that gathered dust.

What my father built at his workbench was his workbench. He never had time to actually construct anything. He was a man with too many things he wanted to pursue, but he never had enough time to enjoy what he'd assembled the gear for.

He worked two jobs all of my teenage years to keep me and my sister in lessons and clothes and, finally college. We rarely saw him. He rarely saw us or his workbench.

“A toolbox?” I had said of his last-minute gift to me as we got into the car for the three-hour drive to my first year of college. He had tucked the red metal box—my own name painted on top—next to the boxes of bedspreads and curtains, baskets and bulletin boards, books and file cases. ”What will I need with a toolbox?”

A year later I asked, “What will I need with a teaching degree?” My father, proud of my choice to study drama, pleased with my enthusiasm over set construction and costume design and choreographing children's theater, was also straining to enable me to pursue these frivolous choices. He suggested maybe I might consider a back-up plan to drama, that I might consider teaching as a career, “in case” I had to support myself.

Four years after that question (and armed with a diploma and a teaching credential), I asked my father, “Why are you telling me this?” We were standing in front of the little house I had grown up in; I was visiting from out of state for my grandmother's funeral. He said he wanted to thank me for being a good daughter; he said he wanted me to know he loved me. I asked the question because I thought I could have been a better daughter; because I already knew about the love.

Three weeks after that last conversation my father died.

I don't know what became of the toolbox. In my first dorm room I hung up my own curtain rods, screwed together the bulletin board and hung it, measured the angle of the floor for assembling a bookcase. The freshman girls on my floor tapped on my door: “I heard you have a toolbox! Do you happen to have a ____?” My toolbox became part of my college gear, like my Royal typewriter. It followed me into the first marriage at least, the one I was involved with when my father died. He never knew that I went on to teach for the next thirty-five years, that I was always financially independent, (in case), that I worked on the sets, the costumes of the school plays I choreographed, that I repaired and repainted my house as a single mother.

“'What will I need with a toolbox?'” Right.