Green Permanent

As you told it to me — our clearest, most reflective conversations so often then and there, in the middle of the night, staring into the darkness from wherever the mind has perched in its wanderings — you left your mother and the home aide upstairs, and went down into your father’s basement workroom to look for the right size screws; in her own wanderings, she has tugged off the front door lock. Paneled in warped wood and abandoned like a mine, you find the string for the light in the middle of the room, as he must have known how to find it in the dark, and again you see the pegboard walls covered with constellations of polishing tools, the larger buffers hooked onto the paneling like fuzzy planets, the smaller ones stuck in a Lucite block he customized to hold them like the varied moons those hanging planets might need, or a miniature copse of fantastical trees. So, too, the see-through brick in which he drilled holes for the array of drill bits themselves, their swirled metal tops imitating a skyline of onion domes and tapered gothic towers. The room’s order had been disturbed by time, and the band saw, jigsaw, the sander, and free-standing machines, the sized wrenches, pliers, picks, awls, and extra parts still hanging in their packages, the staple gun, lamps, brushes, gooseneck magnifying glass, soldering wire, conversion charts, the hundreds of other disordered tools, they might have been words in an encyclopedia before you could read more than a few words, and for you they were part of your father’s speech, or maybe more like your mother’s now, jumbled, rarely creating a sentence. With these tools he had sculpted a perfect cluster of grapes, still on their vine and still with their leaves; a wave, and a school of dolphins breaching; a formal replica of the Brooklyn Bridge with all its cabling; a bouquet of flowers — surfaces so smooth and rounded, objects so like their living counterparts we had no choice but to understand the power of creation running through the mind then tools and hands like a current. You looked around for the right size screws and came upon a small box marked Green Permanent. And when you opened it you saw small tubes of paint, now just mud without his attention, you said, holding both the power of what we do, and the sadness that it has to end.