My Father's Tools
I CARRY AROUND my father's tools with me. Oh, not all of them, of course, but a heavy enough sampling: a hammer, a few wrenches, some screwdrivers he liked to use, a pair of wirestrippers he always called "dikes," a carpenter's square with an intact and functional bubble level guide. He loved working with these tools and I have photographs of him taken before I was born, showing him in his workshop working intently enough to be unaware that someone was making his picture.
My father died in 1976, early in the year, so his tools have some sentimental value, but my keeping them near me goes deeper. The hammer and the screwdriver have wooden handles that have darkened from his sweat, and I figure a good deal of my father's genetic material has worked its way into the grain of that wood. So as I see it, his spirit has physically infused the wooden handles of these tools.
The most powerful memories of my father when I was young are of his working with these tools in his basement workshop in Rhode Island, or later, in our West L.A. garage with its neatly pegboard-sided tool bench. When I use these tools, I feel as if I am still holding my father's hand. I can't dump these tools and I can't give them away because nobody else could possibly value them the way I do. They are a useful repository of my father's memory.
I created a radio series years ago early in the morning called "A Dream of Knowledge," and recorded most of the shows on audio cassettes. I can't listen to any of these tapes anymore without a great deal of embarrassed cringing. I've carried these tapes with me through every move I've made since the days when they were recorded in 1981, and now I keep the tapes in a blue plastic milk crate in the shed out back of my mother's house.
Taking care of these things has become a pain in the neck. Through the years, I've tried to get rid of them from time to time. Once, three years ago, I actually got as far as putting them into a dumpster. Less than an hour later, I was climbing back into the thing, digging through other peoples' trash to rescue those tapes and bring them out again.
Most recently, when I got back from Kagoshima in July, I sorted through all the tapes again, throwing the ones I didn't want into a cardboard carton box. That didn't last long. I just couldn't do it. My own spirit somehow resides in those tapes. If I could burn them up in an all-consuming blaze, I'd do it. Or I'd bury them at sea. I just didn't want to be buried in a cruddy landfill in Ventura County for the rest of eternity. You've got to be more conscious about what you do with your stuff.
Moving around as much as I do, struggling against materialism becomes a matter of practicality. I said to the guy sitting next to me on the China Airliner, "We got rid of everything! We packed up the stuff we couldn't live without, the tools, the negatives, the books and papers, and the rest of the stuff we threw out or gave away. Every time something we'd used went out the door, Misuzu would say a thanks to the thing. That's what it is about materialism. We feel somehow that a part of ourselves is invested in the thing and the idea makes it hard to get rid of stuff. Well, maybe that idea, of spiritual investment in our material possessions, is just an illusion."
And the guy looked at me, looked straight at me, and said, "Yeah. And maybe it isn't."
Misuzu took her bicycle, the second-hand one I gave her years ago for her birthday, down to the recycle corner in our Tagami neighborhood on the mid-summer night we were getting ready to leave town. A half-hour later, when I took some more stuff down there, a lamp and our two motorcycle helmets, the bike was gone. Somebody'd done us the favor of taking the old bicycle off our hands for us, and is probably even now riding it around Kagoshima, buying groceries, commuting to work. That's the sunny, optimistic way to look at it. Maybe the guy who took it was loaded on beer and shochu, figured he was stealing the bike from some little kid and got a massive adrenaline rush, filed off the bike's serial number, spray-painted it silver, and sold it for enough yen to get more drunk and go out to do more crimes. Or maybe he just rode it home and then chucked it into the river. How should I know?
Balance! The thing about it isn't that things are meaningless, but that they just might be a lot more meaningful than I had ever considered. If you'll grant that all living things are manifestations of this embracing collective spirit, then how big a leap is it to lump in as spiritual all the rest of the junk we live with, the things we handle, the stuff we use.
Does this mean my cars will be waiting for me when I get to heaven?
What if my cars get to heaven, but I don't?
Mendocino, August 1996