At age 70, when we first met, my future father-in-law was all about bridge and poker, his stock club and his garden.
At age 87, when Denny and I sold everything and hit the road, it was his stock club and his beloved garden.
At age 95, it was his garden.
At age 97, he slept.
Yesterday I spent a few hours going through Dad's garage, sorting and separating everything in preparation for the house sale. And it was there that I learned of Dad's parsimonious side. Old spark plugs ready to be cleaned and re-gapped, torn bits of netting shoved into a plastic pail to be used and re-used over the lettuce to keep the rabbits at bay, sturdy tools with handles wrapped in six layers of duct tape to keep them from falling apart, buckets of gravel for who-knows-what use. Much of it will simply go to the landfill because it is too old, too worn, too dried out to be of use to anyone.
Denny's dad was a pipefitter by trade, and he has myriad bits and pieces of metal strewn around to show it. I'm finding unusual old amp meters (I'm guessing) and electrical equipment that I vaguely recognize along with huge, heavy pipe wrenches that took muscular arms to heft. If Dad didn't have a tool he wanted, he crafted one by duct taping or soldering together pieces of two disparate items that worked. If something broke, he didn't buy new, but fixed the old. A new picture of my father-in-law is forming in my mind of a hard-working man who cared little about the finer things in life but was only interested in providing for his family and saving his money for them to have after his death.
Who knew that by clearing out a garage I'd find my father-in-law?
2 comments:
So much of who we are is rarely known. He sounds like a fine man.
As a side note.. I had to look up "parsimonious". :-)
Coll, I slipped that one in for you!
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