TOOLS [Sun, 6-21-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Reminiscences of An Old Man—TOOLS [Sun, 6-21-26]

 

Today is Father’s Day, so I’m thinking about tools.

A hardware store flyer came in the mail yesterday. I looked through it carefully. I don’t need or want anything from a hardware store, but I do it to honor and remember my father. Also in honor of my late brother, Jim, who inherited our father’s tool ability.

My father loved tools, and so he loved hardware stores. In his last years, when he had given away all his tools because he had to go to a senior citizen apartment, or was living in a nursing home room, he would have me take him to a hardware store, ostensibly to buy a light bulb or a cleaning cloth. Really it was so he could browse the shelves, to see what was new. The only eyesight he had left was about ten percent in one eye, but he would get that eye right up against the shelf, and comment unfavorably on the price.

I had no interest in tools myself, not his kind of tools. He lost his eyesight in an industrial accident when I was five. Shortly thereafter, I entered into the fourth of the eight stages of psychological-social growth, as outlined by Erik Erikson, industry vs inferiority. It’s basically when you learn to use tools, or fail to learn how to use them.

Tools, of course, are not just the hardware kind. There were many household tools that women had to learn to use. Doctors have to learn to use scalpels. Scientist have to learn to use telescopes and microscopes. But to me, tools meant the kind my father used.

Dad organized his tools so that he could still find them and use them, even with his minimal eyesight.

I, of course, was fascinated by his tools, so I would sometimes get one out to “use,” which meant to play with. I would sometimes leave it in the yard, where he couldn’t find it. In my psyche I heard him say, “You can’t use tools.” I think he probably said some variant of “You can’t use MY tools,” for good reason. I, however, internalized the idea that I could not use any kind of tool. I still can’t use his kind of tools. I settled for inferiority over industry.

Sort of.

I did play the bassoon, which requires as much manual dexterity as most workbench tools.

Also, I took up another kind of tool, language.

I wanted to be a journalist. That’s the trade of one who uses words as tools. I loved stories and wanted to tell them. Just as importantly, I wanted to tell them honestly. Everyone said that Ernie Pyle told the story of WW II the way it really was. I wanted to be an Ernie Pyle.

There is, of course, a different way to use the tools of words, just as there is a wrong way to use my father’s kind of tools, to make the instruments of war rather than to build a cradle for a little child. Many users of words use them to misinform, to propagandize, to lie.

Mastering a tool isn’t the only task. The tool user must also be mastered.

John Robert McFarland

“The aim of literature is to discover and illuminate truth, whether biography or history or fiction.” Rachel Carson