If Only I Had a Hammer

Sitting at the table in the corner of the cafe, she turned the knife over in her hands, opening and closing the blade with a practiced nonchalance. It was one of the smaller ones from the Buck Company, a three inch blade, enough for most tasks that popped up in a day. It had been the last knife her dad had carried before he became bed-ridden. She smiled as she remembered how he had used it and its predecessors for myriad manual tasks throughout her life. He had repaired cars, fixed toys, sharpened pencils, and even performed an ill-advised, but somewhat successful, surgery on a cyst on her cat’s ear when she was seven. He always had one in his pocket until 9/11 and the resulting proliferation of metal detectors made it inconvenient. When stopped trying to enter a building, he would smile and tell the security guards, “Maybe I could’ve done something twenty years ago with this little thing, but I don’t think I’m a threat to the public body these days.” Most of the guards would smile and offer to hold the knife while he did whatever business he had. Others would hold a hard line and tell him it had to go back to the car. He always sighed, but with a smile at the fellow human doing their job and walked back to where had parked, sometimes sticking the offending item in the glovebox or throwing it on the seat and sometimes getting in a driving home, the task saved for another day.

In a fit of teen piqué, she once said to him, “When the only tool you have is a hammer, you treat everything like a nail,” after he had used it for some small task in front of her friends. It had embarrassed her that he had used it around them as though their fathers were above working with their hands ... as though that was something positive. 

He just looked at her and smiled. “No, sweet pea. When your only tool is a hammer, you learn to use it as a pry bar, or a wedge, or an adjuster, or even an ax. A hammer is just a tool, like my knife. It’s up to us how we use them.” It was a gentle admonishment and she used the same basic saying for years, a bit of Dad advice she carried all her life.

As soon as she was able, he taught her to sharpen the knives: three-in-one oil on the whetstone, the low angle, and the sweep across the grain. The edge would gleam after the oil was wiped off and she would cringe as he pressed his thumb onto the edge to test its sharpness, a red line remaining when he lifted the digit, but never any blood. It took her five times before she learned how to test the blade with bleeding, and he let her continue to try until she figured out the exact point where she could tell the knife was sharp without pressing hard enough to cut herself. 

After the strokes began, the knife sat on his nightstand. He would pick it up every once in a while and struggle to open the blade, the release button too stiff for his increasingly feeble hands. “Open this,” he would say, handing it to her. “It’s too hard, isn’t it? Will you send it back to Buck? They’ll fix it.” 

She could open it easily, but pretended it was difficult. “Yes. It’s tough. I’ll send it back.” She slipped it into her pocket and then into her car console when she left the house.  She told him whenever he asked afterwards that she had sent it off and was just waiting for it to come back. After a few months, he didn’t ask anymore. 

Once it was in her possession, she found herself using it more and more, realizing the effectiveness of the tool in her hands. She used the fine point to tighten the screws in her sunglasses and the blade to cut through zip ties in packaging. She used the edge to work a splinter from her thumb and the hilt to press open a soda can top after the tab had broken mid pull. She even used it as a hammer on occasion. 

At his funeral, she set it on the lectern while she gave the eulogy and looked down at it when her voice faltered, the sight making her take a deep breath and resume in a booming imitation of his, telling the “hammer” story along with a handful of others, his words still living as long as they were repeated. 

She thought about placing the knife in the casket, but knew he would have thought that a waste, so she carried it everywhere she could and used it more all the time. It made her think of him, though she didn’t need the prodding, and every time she felt it in her hands, a flash of a vision of his, so big and still strong, crossed her mind. And, every once in a while, when she was using it for something almost  no one would’ve thought a foreseeable use for a blade, his voice would sound in her mind. “It’s just a tool, baby. You decide how to use it.”