Seventy Pounds of Memory Leaning on My Spleen

It’s a specific kind of failure when you can't look at a Crown Royal bag without tasting parking-lot exhaust.

In 1987 I was young enough to think running meant solving something. I was twenty-three, sleeping in a cheap motel out in the Soo with a burgundy Snap-on box weighing down the dresser like an anchor. Seventy pounds of my old man’s whole life. The broken offset screwdriver he never threw out. The ball-peen hammer with a crack running through the handle like a fault line in granite. The fish tape coiled up tight, like he was praying to it.

That box shouldn’t have been mine to carry, but I took it when I left Thunder Bay. He didn’t notice for three days.

The six-cylinder was out in the parking lot, idling. January cold, the kind that turns your breath into fog before it leaves your mouth. I sat on the edge of that motel bed nursing a Crown Royal and listening to that engine hum through the paper-thin walls. Somewhere around midnight I just stood up, grabbed my boots, and walked out.

I left the toolbox under the lamp. I left him under the lamp. I don’t know if that’s theft or tribute, but either way I’ve been paying interest on it for forty-one years.

People ask why I still use a chalk line when laser levels exist. It’s because every snap reminds me I got a debt I can never re-thread straight. That fish tape is still coiled up in my chest somewhere, waiting for a pull that’s never coming.

Brenda says I talk about tools like they’re saints. Maybe I do. A cracked hammer handle is just wood until you remember the hand that swung it.