My father worked six days a week. He left the house before dawn and came home after dark. Sunday was the only day of the week he was ours, and Sunday was the day everything happened.
Sundays were swap meet days
As far back as I can remember, Sundays meant going somewhere with my dad. Sometimes a hardware store. Most often, a swap meet in one of the two neighboring towns. There was one swap meet on the east side of us and another on the west side. They both ran every Saturday and Sunday, and we would visit one or the other at least once a month for my entire childhood.
This was not a modern swap meet. There were no folding tables stacked with cheap bulk goods imported from a factory overseas. This was something quieter, and slower, and more honest than that. It was rows of little garage sales held by ordinary people who had pulled their things out of their actual garages — old tools, kitchen pans, fishing tackle, hand-cranked anything, hammers and saws and wrenches with handles worn smooth by other people's grandfathers. Nothing was new. Everything had a story, and most of the stories had been forgotten by the people selling them.
My dad and I would walk slowly between the tables. He never rushed me. He would pick something up and turn it over and put it back. He would talk to the seller about the weather, about whether the Chevy still ran. And every few minutes, without fail, he would look down at me and ask the same question.
"You see anything you want, son?"
I usually picked a hammer
I do not know why a small kid picks a hammer at a swap meet. I think it was the weight. A hammer feels like a serious thing in a small hand. It feels like a tool a grown man would carry. Most weeks the hammer I wanted cost fifty cents. Sometimes a dollar. My dad would dig the coins out of his pocket without ever once raising an eyebrow. He would hand the seller the change. He would hand me the hammer. We would walk back to the truck.
I would carry that hammer home like it was the only thing in the world that mattered. I would take it out to the back of the house and find a piece of scrap wood and try to drive a nail through it. Sometimes I would bend the nail. Sometimes I would hit my own thumb. Sometimes I would actually get it to go in and feel like I had built something out of nothing.
Then, eventually, I would put the hammer down. And forget about it. And the next month, on another Sunday, I would walk through another swap meet and pick out another hammer for another fifty cents. And my dad would buy that one too.
I never thought about it. Not once. It was just what we did on Sundays.
A few years ago he passed
A few years ago my father passed. I cleaned out his garage. He had been working in that garage for forty years. There were cabinets I had never opened. There were drawers I had never seen the inside of. There were corners I had never noticed.
I started by stacking things. Anything similar I would put in the same pile. Wrenches in one pile. Screwdrivers in another. Sandpaper in a third. Coffee cans full of mixed nails and screws in a fourth. Slowly the garage started to make sense to me, the way it must have made sense to him every day for forty years.
Then I opened a cabinet near the back wall. And in that cabinet was a stack of hammers.
Not three or four hammers. Not a dozen. Sixty-eight hammers.
I counted them twice because I did not believe the first count. They were stacked carefully — claw hammers, ball-peen hammers, framing hammers, tack hammers, tiny ones small enough for a child's hand, big ones almost too heavy to lift. Some of them looked exactly like the kind of hammer a small kid would pick out at a swap meet because it felt important.
And standing there in the quiet of his garage, I knew. He had kept every one of them. For my whole childhood, every fifty cents he had ever spent on me at a swap meet, every hammer I had carried home and forgotten about, every tool I had moved on from before the end of the day — he had picked them up. He had wiped them off. He had taken them out to his garage. He had put them in a cabinet near the back wall. And he had never said a word about it. Not at Christmas. Not on a birthday. Not the week before he died.
My father never told me what those Sundays meant to him. He showed me, in fifty-cent increments, hammer by hammer, for as long as I was a kid.
As a child, those hammers meant a lot to me. But as an adult, after I saw what they meant to my father, they mean the world to me.