The Old Man had taken the scissors apart and sharpened them on a whetstone by hand. Now they were put back together and oiled. They were made of steel from stern to bow and were heavy for their size. Along with them, he and my grandmother gave me a small, folding card table to use in the kitchen, and a set of dishes they had long since put away. All of these items have since escaped me, swallowed by the shifting sands of time, but my memory of the gifts has not changed. The triumvirate of items means something to me, though I’m still figuring out what that would be.
I was moving away from home to a new town for work, setting up housekeeping for myself as an adult for the first time. This was a couple years after college and long before I met the woman I would marry, nearly a decade before I would hold my own child.
All three items were sturdy. The card table had been made before flimsy goods were the norm. The dishes were solid, too. They had been replaced in my grandmother’s cupboard by a new set she’d received as a gift for Christmas, otherwise they’d never have left their station on the front line.
“I found these in the shop and thought it would be a good pair of scissors for you,” the Old Man said.
I was not going into any profession that required scissors, especially. He had just found them in his shop and thought they would be a good set for me, so he had renovated them with my future use in mind.
“Thank you,” I must have said. What else would there be to say?
It seemed like there should have been something more to say. I could feel the unspoken weight of it, but I couldn’t tell, really, what it was.
It was a graduation, of sorts, into adulthood, though no hard break was being defined. The Old Man had led me in a thousand sorties onto the water or into the field, and now those all felt very distant. It wasn’t like I’d never see him again. He was reasonably healthy, after all, and I wasn’t even moving that far away. We could go fishing again whenever we wanted. More now, even, maybe. Still, I could feel there was something final about the exchange.
I think the Old Man knew how friends, even close ones, slowly go in directions that gradually diverge. The opportunity is there for a long time, though the impetus has faded away. Phases of life run their course and anything left undone or unsaid might as well stay that way because, if it’s said later, it’s coming from a person who’s become someone else, and it’s being said to someone else, and it doesn’t mean the same thing. It doesn’t mean anything, really.
I moved to the new town with a few trips of hauling in my car. I put the table in my apartment’s kitchen, and I put the dishes into the cabinet. It was a full set of dishes, as for a large family, but they were packed in such a way that I thought I might as well just take them all out while I was at it. So I filled several cabinets with porcelain and glass and smiled at the slightly absurd. The scissors I put into a drawer. I took them out when I needed scissors for something.
All three gifts carried a message of waste not, want not of course, but I don’t think that’s really what they meant. Maybe it’s just that they came from an old couple who had meant a lot to me, and still do, and having the things present with me any time I had a use for something utilitarian and sturdy was a reminder of that. I think that’s some of it.
Maybe the rest was just to remind me to look at the relationships I have today, to occasionally consider them with an external eye, the better to mark their passing, and to make sure I enjoy them in their time.
It would be pleasant to say I still have and treasure all three gifts. Or, barring that, the scissors, at least, but I don’t. Life is not often pleasant that way. Somewhere along my winding they’ve escaped me, but I used them in their time and I’ll remember them always, and maybe that’s the final part of what the gifts mean — to use what you have while you have it, then treasure the memories when they’re gone.
Kevin Tate is a freelance writer. Email [email protected].
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