One tin of screws sorted by a logic only he understood, and the pencil behind his ear.

When the house was sold we had a weekend to empty the workshop. My brother took the good tools, which was right, because he uses them. I took what nobody else wanted, and I have been trying to work out why ever since.

The tin

It is a tobacco tin with a dent in the lid, full of screws. They are not sorted by size, or by type, or by anything I can identify. And yet he could put his hand in without looking and come out with the right one.

I still reach for that tin, and I still have not found the logic. I have started to suspect that the logic was him.

The pencil

He kept it behind his right ear for fifty years. There were dozens of them around the workshop, all worn down to the same stub, each with the marks of his teeth at the end. I took one. It is on the shelf above where I write, and I do not use it.

You can inherit a man’s tools. You cannot inherit what his hands knew.

What I kept without meaning to

The rest came along invisibly. The way I measure everything twice and still get it wrong. The habit of humming one bar of something, over and over, while concentrating. A deep and unreasonable respect for anyone who sweeps up at the end of the day.

I am not good with my hands. He knew that and he never mentioned it. But I sweep up, every evening, even in a house with no sawdust in it.