An old man’s pockets are filled with things. I knew this as a child, along with much else that I have since forgotten. But my grandfather always carried a Barlow knife and an Indian head penny. You might have thought that those pockets were filled with an endless string of recollections too, along with the plug tobacco and folding money in a silver clip, especially, given all the words that came out as well, but those words, never written down, are mostly lost now, or muddied in my own mind, and besides, they were not always true, and never the whole story in any case—and were often, like the axe in the legend, the same story twice.
My grandfather told me once that his own grandfather, who was a doctor, always carried string. Bits of string. I am sure he told me why, but I forgot that fact, replaced now with my own imaginings. He might have used them for tourniquets. Or to tie his medicines up in packets. I don’t know now. But my grandfather never spoke about his father, so it was his grandfather’s pockets I knew something about.
His grandfather also carried a silver dollar. I knew this because once, when I had purchased a silver dollar myself, on some forgotten impulse, and I showed it to my grandfather as a new prized possession, purchased far away in New York with the money from one of my first jobs, he told me that the date, 1882, was the same as the year he was born. He told me that fact and that his own grandfather always carried one from the date of his marriage, some time in the 1830’s, and that this coin had been a gift from his grandfather on that wedding day. And with that bit of string, I fell headlong into a well of time from which I never escaped. My grandfather’s, grandfather’s grandfather. I could not truly imagine such a passage, but I tried.
My grandson asked me once why I always carried a knife. I made something simple up for that answer to avoid the inconvenience of a full explanation, and said it was just for work. And I regretted that lie immediately because I realized he might remember what I had said and that this odd thread would then be woven into the family fabric.
My own pocket knife was the impromptu gift of a friend when I admired the one he was using on a box one day and he learned that I did not have one. This is an efficient and modern looking thing, a small machine of stainless steel with none of the character of an old Barlow knife. But the gift was done so sincerely, I could not refuse, and now that lie had been told. My grandson would believe it was just a tool to cut boxes of books open in my shop instead of the truth. But in truth I always cut my boxes with whatever was at hand. A pair of scissors would do. A mat knife, certainly, but they were usually not in the right place at the right time. Even a key would be sufficient. But my own knife was usually left in my pocket, safe against my habitual forgetfulness. That was where it was meant to be, I think. With another memory.
The steel of my grandfather’s Barlow knife was a mottled gray from much use. He chewed Red Man tobacco and he cut his plugs with that old knife about a dozen times a day. Only the edge of it shone, and the bone handle was worn nearly smooth so that when I went to the store to buy one just like it, there was nothing of the kind to be found. And I never knew the date on that Indian Head penny he had. It too had been worn smooth beyond interpretation. Over some years I asked to see it numerous times, thinking some new glimpse might enlighten me in that copper ghost. My grandfather could never remember. Or so he said. Or perhaps it was worn away before he got it. And the silver clip on his folding money had a faint inscription engraved on it that could no longer be read, and my grandfather would not reveal. Maybe he had forgotten what that inscription said as well. That would certainly be a family trait. But no. I’d rather think this clip was a wedding gift from my grandmother and the sentiment was a private thing. They were married in 1905.
The silver clip of bills was kept in his ‘poke.’ That leather purse, with a small nickel-plated clip at one end and battered into being about as ugly as a large scrotum, also contained the loose change he used in transactions while selling his produce. This purse was kept in the larger bib pocket of his overalls.
The only things I truly remember are those that I have written down. Truly is the operative word. I remember all sorts of things, actually. But I am reasonably certain only of those things that I wrote down through the years in an effort to become a ‘writer,’ a life-long endeavor. And though I have lost much of what I wrote in many moves and a few disasters, I know what it is that I once wrote down and what it is that I have conjured later, by the feel of it. One is done from the bottom of a well, and the other in the full light of day. One has the patina of use and the other the shine of utility. I have tried to collect what seemed true to me here, from all of it, and to avoid the lies I tell too readily to avoid the inconvenient, because my own pockets are not so deep.
My grandfather wore bib overalls most days. They had many pockets and there always seemed to be another to pull something from. Some things that I noted were a hickory nut, picked up to show me the difference in it to a pecan, but then carried for weeks afterward, a small round lump in the denim, and also a little tool that looked like the letter ‘L’ that fit something that I never saw him use, and once, for a time, a red plastic disk he spotted in the mud when we went fishing. The plastic was scratched to a fine patina and he briefly held it up to his eye and looked toward the sun, before cussing his ‘foolishness.’ I remember that because I then received a lecture about looking at the sun which I took to be a revised version of the Icarus myth where another ‘fella’ did this particular thing and went blind. That red disk remained in his bib pocket for the rest of that summer, and I could see the outline of it there and asked to look at it several times and each time was made to promise not to look at the sun. When held by one eye like a monocle, it gave a rosy hue of the world around.
Most of my memories are from the 1950’s and 1960’s, when my grandfather would have been in his 70’s or 80’s. My grandmother was about five years younger. For much of that time he was spry enough to hold on to the wooden gate at either side at the back and climb up into the bed of his old green Chevy pickup, but his increasing arthritis was to my great benefit. I was brought along for help on his daily ventures. After we had driven down to Greenville in the dark of the morning, picked up a load of watermelon and cantaloupe at the farmer’s market, and brought them back, he would pick out one of his favorite spots, usually where a tree offered shade at the edge of a field on highway 29, and we would spend part of a day there when the mills were changing shifts, selling them to the people passing.
Their own smaller farm produced a good deal of corn and tomatoes, green and red peppers, potatoes and okra, and beans, of course, mostly at the hands of my grandmother, but not nearly enough. The majority of what was sold was purchased locally from other farms, and in this way, I got to see many of those homes, sitting on strange porches and drinking sweet tea, while listening to their stories, before loading bushel baskets into the back of the truck of whatever bounty was in season.
All of that was exotic to me, a ‘New York boy.’ That was the way I was often introduced, at least for the first time. ‘Alma Lee’s’ boy to those who knew him better.
Sitting on a porch at the edge of someone else’s life is a lesson. The smells alone were enough—often the sweet, pectin-tinged fragrance of canning peaches or the sour tang of pickling. Some women cooked earlier in the day and some later. But it was almost always older women—older, which usually just meant someone closer to my grandfather’s age. The older men more often sat in the shade of the yard and attended to some small chore while they talked. I think the women were happy for an excuse to get out of the heat of the kitchen. I was doubly happy because they often offered a slice of peach pie to go with the tea.
Many of those farms were managed by wives and husbands who were working second jobs in the Mill and simply weren’t home. If they had younger children I was often required to ‘play’ with them, which meant excruciating minutes standing in one spot or two and telling them what life was like in the suburbs of New York. I think that was truly the beginning of my early fabrications. Trying to entertain a flat-faced boy who would rather be hitting something with a stick can be a challenge.
Part of a day would be spent driving through small neighborhoods near the mills, with my grandfather calling attention to his familiar presence by a sing song chant such as, ‘rosenears, maters, melons and potaters,’ as we slowly rolled through. He never used a bell, but if the streets were too empty, he sometimes beeped his horn. Those who were home or between shifts at the mill would gather to buy whatever they wanted. The bed of the truck was set tight with the poplar baskets of produce close at hand and the melons piled deeper to the back and it was part of my job to scramble and grab whichever particular one was pointed to. This game sometimes took multiple attempts as one or another of the melons that I handed forward appeared deficient on closer inspection. Supermarket vegetables were regularly disparaged as paper sacks or apron pockets were filled.
At some point in the journey it was time to get some fuel and ‘plunder’ the aisles of a small local market. These were often unique establishments attached to the gas stations in those days before the ‘convenience’ store, emblazoned with large pressed-metal signs in garish colors advertising Grape Nehi, or Orange Crush, or Pepsi, where someone might barter some gas or oil or ‘dope,’ which was just another name for Coca Cola, for a bushel or two of whatever my grandfather had, to sell to their own customers.
It was during such days that I pestered my grandfather for information abut the details of things. As a consequence, the memory of the hum and vibration of a 1950’s pickup with the windows open is a comfort to me even now, as is the smell of leaded gas and the click and whine of the gas pumps as they wound through their odd bifurcated numbers. This is what nostalgia is to me, more than the shine on a 1956 Chevy. I cannot stand in a lot of beautiful old cars today, so proudly displayed by their loving owners as the flagships of their own childhoods, and feel anything more than I feel in my own memories of those odd stations so indelibly attached to anecdotal histories of older times and places I never actually lived but felt I knew.