Friday, July 01, 2011

Reminiscing

The other day while I was driving home, traffic came to an utter and irrevocable stop.  Big surprise.  This time, it was because they were painting the road lines. The wind was blowing just in the right direction, and as I drove by I got a very strong scent of the paint.  It smelled not like a normal house paint, mind you, but more like the stuff you get out of the aerosol cans.  I'm sure a lot of you know the difference I speak of.  It smells more like paint THINNER than actual paint, when you get right down to it.

Catching a whiff of this made me remember some things that I haven't thought about for quite some time.  When I was a kid, around 11 or 12 years old, my brother asked my Mom to start working at his shop as the secretary.  These days, most parents would probably be quite comfortable leaving their children at home by themselves at that age.  My mother wasn't.  Therefore, every day after school, my grandfather would pick me up and take me to his place.

I remember not liking this quite a bit.  I enjoyed being home (which remains true to this day), and also this was change and to a kid my age, change was bad, etc.  Eventually I got over it, of course, as any kid would.  I loved my grandparents, and being at their house just became part of my daily routine.

Back to the aroma of canned paint, the memories that this invoked involve my grandfather's garage.  He worked in a steel mill for 39 years, and was naturally retired by the time I started staying at his house.  He dabbled with carpentry in his spare time, and was considered to be my town's handy-man of sorts.  Neighbors would call him up with a facet that was leaking, or a door that wouldn't close correctly, and he would go and fix it.  For a fee, of course.  He also built things, such as bookcases, shelves, spice racks, and other such wood-crafts.  Therefore, any time I would walk into his garage, there would always be the smell of something -- paint, wood stain, turpentine, something like that.

After a while, probably when I became a teenager, I was still spending my time there and eventually he let me help him out with certain things.  Not only that, but he encouraged me to do things on my own, as well.  So there I was, 13 years old, and using power saws, band saws, table saws, drills, staple guns, nail guns, power sanders, and many different kind of hand tools, some of which I'd never knew existed.  (For example, I had this little tool that was used to place really small nails so that they could be hammered into place.)

My Mom still has some of the things I made her around the house.  A few of the things I remember making were wooden decorative signs.  I remember cutting out the letters using a stencil on the band saw.  Being at that age, I'm amazed I didn't lose any fingers, really.  I suppose, if my grandfather didn't think I was mature enough to use that equipment, he wouldn't have let me do so.  But I was so amazed at the freedom he gave me, and I had such a feeling of independence.

There's a part of me that wishes I could have had the chance to talk to him at least once as I am now.  While I've always been and acted older than my age, I was still a kid at 13.  I'm sure the two of us would have had some amazing conversations if we were able to speak today.  I'm a lot better at the whole talking thing now.

And I should probably end this post on that note.  Thinking about this has brought back so many other memories of my summers there, and I could probably go on all day long about it.  

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