Sometime in the 1930s my father bought this – a draughtsman's set. After my parents were married it lived in the soft darkness – rarely-worn scarves, soft gloves – at the back of one of his wardrobe drawers. I'd occasionally see it when I was desperate and had left my brass compass at school (2/6 at the beginning of each school year because I had a gift for losing them), and had geometry for homework. I seem to remember he lent it to me the day I had to sit for a scholarship exam, when he also lent me his slim, brown, worked leather briefcase with sturdy wrap-around zip. I saw that a little more often than what I thought of as the geometry set, but not much more.
I won the scholarship (much to my shock). Mostly, I think, because he lent me these magical instruments.
Ah yes, the magic of fathers' tools. Somehow they always seem to make projects go faster and more successfully. I know my father's tools, now mine and Nate's, continue to provide us with help we need long before we imagine a need for it.
ReplyDeleteIt's the implicit approval. That's the magic. And the potency of defeating Time.
ReplyDeleteIn 2004, when Peter Mathers was dying of pancreatic cancer, I made a rushed trip to Melbourne in the hope of seeing him before he died. My uncle lent me his leather briefcase, which he hadn't used for over 20 years, since he retired from the Adelaide Botanic Gardens, so I could carry some manuscripts with me that I'd just had bound. As I went through airport security, the alarms went off, and the security personel determined that their detectors had found a trace of chemicals pertaining to explosives. I was isolated in an interrogation room, while they conducted a more thorough investigation of the bag. It was never determined whether there was a trace of superphosphate from the Gardens in the bag or whether the glues used in the manuscript binding had set off the alarms. Fortunately they allowed me on the flight in the nick of time. In this case, in the post 9/11 state of high alert, such an slight and innocent inheritance might well have landed me in Guantanamo.
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