The Treasure Box

top: the one I fixed

            My mum has gotten a fair amount of airtime in these posts. I think I’ve mentioned more than once when I have a problem in the shop, I often go to her toolbox and find exactly the right tool to get me out of a spot. Well, today it’s my dad’s turn. Although I have a number of his tools that I use on an almost daily basis, it’s not a tool that enabled me to solve a problem today but a habit he had.

            My dad was what we called, sometimes fondly and sometimes not, a packrat. I don’t think he crossed the line into hoarding, but he certainly skated near it and when he died it took my mum twenty years to clean out all of his treasures. Because of that, Mum was determined not to leave a mess for me to clean up, but that’s another story.

            Dad and Mum both grew up during The Great Depression. Mum told stories of young men riding the rails from one end of the country to the other trying to find work. Nobody had much money so instead of buying something new when a tool or a garment wore out, you fixed it with whatever was around. It stands to reason that the more stuff you had around, the more you had to choose from when a fix was needed. I remember Dad straightening nails and putting them back in cans for future use. He had all sorts collections of things that might come in handy someday. I confess that I also have packrat tendencies although I occasionally get fed up and go on a purge. More often than not a few weeks later I find myself asking ‘why did I throw that out? It would have solved this problem perfectly.’ Luckily, most problems have more than one solution and I usually manage to find an alternative even if the tossed object would have worked better.

         I was clamping something up the other day and happened to use one of my favourite small clamps.  One of the ones I picked up had lost the bolt and nut that holds one of the jaws in place. I’d taken it back to the store where I bought it and asked if they had replacement parts. They told me they didn’t and that I should buy a new clamp. I rejected that option since they are close to $20 a piece and I didn’t think a nut and bolt was worth that much. I set that clamp aside on the bench and when I had the glued object securely clamped, I decided it was time to either fix the clamp or toss it.

            I went to my moderately-sized ‘miscellaneous hardware’ box and started sorting through hinge parts, springs, bits of chain, nuts and bolts. I found a short bolt that fit in the hole and after some more searching I found a nut to match it. Problem solved. Sometimes my packrat tendencies drive me crazy but when I find exactly what I need to fix something, I feel just as delighted as I did when I was a kid  and found a present under the Christmas tree. Thanks, Dad.