Dad’s Pocketknife
This is my father's pocketknife. It just now made its way back to me, by a somewhat odd and circuitous route. He died more than four months ago, and if I thought about his pocketknife at all, I assumed it was buried somewhere in the heaps of personal belongings from his apartment, which I have been slowly—glacially—been picking through since we got everything moved out of there in July. I sift through bins, boxes, crates, and totes loaded with Dad and Mom's personal stuff, deciding what to keep and what to throw away, and I hadn't actually missed that pocketknife.
But yesterday, I received a voice mail from a nurse at the intake unit of LifeCare, the hospice organization that took care of Dad (and Mom, and Wanda) in the final stage. She said they had found Dad's knife, and that she would hold it for me. It seems there was a recent water leak in one of the rooms Dad had been in, necessitating the move of some furniture, and the knife had been found behind a cabinet. Probably fell out of his pocket when we brought him in, and got kicked under the cabinet, back in May. They would never have known who it belonged to, if not for Dad's persistent habit of scratching his name into things, especially tools. Way to go, Dad!
The knife blade has a bit of corrosion, no doubt from the water. But it is Dad's knife, and it will take its place in my little valet on top of my dresser, next to the pocketknife given to me by my father-in-law many years ago. I used that one to open the seal when we spread Wanda's ashes in the Blue Ridge mountains. It seemed fitting and right to use that knife from Wanda's daddy for that specific purpose. But I don't plan to carry either of them in my pocket every day: they're special, family heirlooms, far more important for the sentiment they carry than any mundane use I might put them to. Carrying them around would simply be a chance to lose them, and that I do not want. They're special.
I think back to the pocketknives I've carried over the years, beginning with my first one, purchased at the age of eight from a vending machine at a rest stop along the New York Turnpike while on a family vacation. My parents always gave each of us a little spending money at the beginning of summer vacation, which was ours to spend as we chose. (But when it's gone, it's gone; don't come asking for more!) I was eight years old, and that gleaming little knife was filled with intriguing possibilities. When we got to Cape Cod, visiting my aunt and uncle, my cousins took me off into the woods to show me their secret places, and I used my shiny new pocketknife to mark blazes in tree trunks at each intersection of paths through the woods, so I could learn the route and find my way back. That first pocketknife disappeared sometime before my ninth birthday.
When I was eleven, I had a different pocketknife. Fancier, with multiple blades and even a screwdriver! I used that one in the woods behind my uncle's house in Canada, to kill and skin a frog, before cooking the meaty legs on a flat rock over a small fire and devouring them. My cousin thought I was crazy. The frog legs tasted, in fact, quite like chicken.
Sometime around that same period, age ten or eleven, visiting a different aunt and uncle in a different part of Canada, another cousin asked if he could see my pocketknife. Then he opened the small blade and jabbed me in the arm with it. I had the satisfaction of seeing his father cuff him about the head, but that didn't take the sting out of the puncture in my right triceps. The blood ruined my sweater. My horrified mother took that knife away, and I never saw it again.
Pocketknives have come and gone over the years. I have seldom carried one as an adult. They can be very handy things to have, but they have a way of getting lost, mislaid, slipping from a pocket and disappearing. My dad made sure he scratched his name into this one, which was a gift he cherished from one of his good buddies. And so it was able to make its way back into the family. I hold it, and look at it, and ponder the succession of knives that have come and gone from my pockets, musing about the transience of things. Then I put it into the little drawer where I keep small treasures, special little talismans carrying the great magic of sentimental memories. Someday, when I'm gone, my kids will pick through this stuff, the emotional detritus of a lifetime, and have to decide what to keep, and what to throw away. Eventually, we all end up having to play archaeologist, picking through the layers of other people's lives. It isn't an easy job. But now and then, a treasure turns up, and we have the the privilege of holding it as we remember our dead.