How the People We Love Live On in Us

“What we have once enjoyed deeply we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.” ~Helen Keller

Growing up, I thought my father was a pack rat. He never seemed to throw anything away. Bent nails. Odd screws. Washers without matching bolts. Short pieces of lumber that looked too small to be useful. If there was even the slightest chance something might come in handy someday, he found a place for it in the cellar.

I couldn’t understand it. Why save things you could replace for a few cents at the hardware store?

He would usually just shrug and say, “You never know.”

My father wasn’t a man of many words. Born in 1933, he worked long hours as a plumber, driving a company truck, and was usually gone before I woke in the morning. Many evenings I was already in bed by the time he came home.

He liked quiet while we ate dinner, but once the dishes were cleared, conversation began. He loved to read, watched John Wayne and Aldo Ray whenever they were on television, and every afternoon around four o’clock poured himself a glass of Clan MacGregor Scotch from the green plastic bottle.

Those are the things I remember first.

After he died, my brothers and I spent days cleaning out the cellar. The shelves were lined with coffee cans full of screws, old hinges, and enough bent nails to build another house if someone had the patience to straighten them.

Short pieces of lumber leaned against the wall because they might be useful someday. Every shelf seemed to hold something that someone else would have thrown away years before.

As we worked, I picked up an empty glass jar. I don’t remember deciding to keep it. I tore off a strip of blue painter’s tape, wrapped it around the middle of the jar, found a black Sharpie, and scribbled two words across the tape.

Dad’s Jar.

Then I started dropping things into it.

A screw that was still good. A bent nail that could probably be straightened. An old hinge. Little bits and pieces that I knew my father would have saved.

At the time, I thought I was making a keepsake. A small reminder of him that would sit quietly on a shelf.

Life moved on.

The jar stayed where I had left it. Every now and then I would drop something into it without giving it much thought. A washer. A hinge. A handful of screws left over from a project. It became part of the background, just another jar sitting on a shelf.

Until one ordinary afternoon.

I was working on a project when a perfectly good screw rolled across the floor. Without thinking, I bent down, picked it up, brushed off the dust, unscrewed the lid, and dropped it into Dad’s Jar.

(The views are personal.)

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