my dad's name was bob
Michael Estabrook
I'm in the old house the one I grew up in on
Northfield Avenue, but I'm all grown up now,
and visiting my mother I suppose, she's living
there still by herself, and I'm down in the
basement, and my father's workbench is still
there, strewn with tools, tools all over the
bench and the floor and around the bench, but
the tools are wrenches and pipes cutting tools,
and pipes, and huge nuts and bolts, not the
tools of a car mechanic, not my Father's tools.
And the clothes washer and drier are still there,
and across from the in the corner where the
furnace used to be is a closet door, I open it
and it's filled with paper bags and toweld and
canned goods, and there's spiders in there
too, of course. The place, the whole place, is
a real mess and I'm dying to clean it up. I had
cleaned it up so often as a kid, it was my job,
what I could do well, I had a system. I look
across and there on top of the old dented
metal cabinet way in the back are some
crumpled up blue coveralls like the kind car
mechanics wear, and my heart jumps, maybe
those are my Dad's coveralls stuffed back in
there like that for all these last 30 years. So I
reach back and pull them out, they are stiff
and terribly wrinkled, and they have dried grease
on them. I smell them but they don't smell like
him, they smell dusty. I look for the little white
patch above the shirt pocket where the name
should be, and I find that it's faded, I hold it
under the light bulb and see the name Jim.
