Straightening nails

My dad was the kind of guy who didn’t have time for a cellphone. Oh, he had a one, but it never left the drawer of the end table in their sitting room. Anyone who visited my parents’ home was asked about their cell phone ownership status and within moments Dad would try to give his cellphone away. I can’t even begin to give a count of the number of times, over the years, he asked me if I had need of an extra cellphone—his cellphone. The day my brothers and I cleaned my parents’ house, for the last time, we laughed (and cried) about a lot of things, the cellphone was near the top of the list for laughs. It was still in its cylindrical container in the drawer of the end table in the sitting room. The service had never been activated, and it had become a piece of electronic junk. Dad wouldn’t have liked the part where something becomes a piece of junk. He didn’t like to waste anything. He came to Canada during the depression and was always a “depression kid”. There was no junk in Dad’s life. Everything had potential. Everything had a second purpose, or even a third. He understood adaptive reuse of everything.

That being said, I admire my dad because he always had a chore for his kids to do if they made the mistake of saying they were bored. Like my mother, Dad had all kinds of useful things for us to do if we were bored. Straightening nails, giving nails a second chance, was a job my younger brother and I were often given on such occasions. Michael and I were given a hammer and a cleaned-out pickle jar full of bent nails. We sat on the concrete floor in the basement, pounding the attitude out of nails that our dad had rescued from his reno projects around the house. Nothing was wasted.

I remember the day he pointed to a huge pile of boards, lying on the patio, and he told us we could pull the nails out of those old boards. It was the same day he showed us how the other end of the hammer worked. For about an hour it felt as if we’d been given a promotion from nail straightener to nail puller. It was hot, sweaty work, out on the patio.

When the job was done, we called Dad over to inspect the pile of nails and the boards. Do I have to say how long the promotion lasted? Dad smirked and told us to sort the boards by lengths, put them in the rack in the basement, then take the nails in and commence to straightening. As we pounded the tar out of those nails, I vowed I would only use brand new nails when I was grown up. Yessir, I’d buy bags of brand new nails at Aikenheads’ and I’d throw all the old boards onto the burn pile. Bent nails and used boards would never be tolerated in my grown-up world. They would be single use, only. And, then.

Well, and then I grew up and became a female repair and reno version of my Dad. I admit to having a stash of used and reused, and used again boards (sans nails) in our barn awaiting reno and repair projects. I have jars of screws, nails, hinges, latches, doorknobs and hooks, all wrested from those boards. I don’t know how this happened. It could be nature. It could be nurture. It could be that little “museum conservator—that adaptive reuser” voice telling me all of that stuff could be useful sometime to someone. I’m more recession than depression. It’s possible I might just be a bit of a cheapskate and a hoarder. Nah, not me.

theresa@wellingtontimes.ca