To a mechanic, there is nothing more ubiquitous than the red shop rag. I have, probably, three thousand. I package them in old Wal-Mart bags and when they are all filthy, I wash them at a work clothes washer at a laundromat.

I have them everywhere. They show up in my sock drawer. I always roll one up and tuck it behind the battery in the truck, so I can check oil. I have a dozen with a tube of waterless hand cleaner in the truck’s emergency kit. They line the drawers of my toolbox. They wrap, oily, around pistols and gun parts.

When dad died, the boys at Ford, not without some ceremony, presented me with his toolbox and the contents of his locker. Toolboxes are very personal, and contain the tools that person finds most useful, in the specific job they do. Like my father before me, I work in automation, only the type of automation he used was a full generation behind what I do, and the gap widens daily.

Anyway, I took the keys to dad’s toolbox and opened it, packed a few of my own extra or large tools in the toolbox, and slid it down to the basement where it rests, most of the time. Yesterday, one of the things I needed out of dad’s toolbox was a slidehammer I put there a year or so ago, and as I pulled it out, a red rag fell out onto the floor.

I picked it up- because it had clunked softly as it fell, which red rags just don’t do- and unrolled it to find dad’s pipe.

Dad smoked an old cheap dunhill all his life. It had a straight shank, hard plastic, fairly heavily bitten. The bowl was straight and thin, the edges burned from 40 years of being lit with a zippo. Dad carried a 16d nail on his keychain to tamp down the burn, but as often used his calloused index finger. The pipe still smelled of dad- Prince albert tobacco, five star for special occasions. After having been a smoker for many yeares, he gave it up as much, like myself, out of cheapness as health reasons. He died of a heart attack, brought on far more of youthful heart damage than anything,so it wasn’t like cigarettes were killing him, and he rarely inhaled the pipe. I guess he just couldn’t bring himself to part with an old friend.

So I stood in my little basement holding dad’s pipe and having all these memories flood back to me. The day I loaded his pipe and the pop sprayed burning ashes over his best suit. The day he beat me with such vigor that the bowl of the pipe unscrewed from the stem, clenched between his teeth. yes, that was the same day.

The day he first took me fishing, his hands big over mine showing me how to push the button and cast, the smoke from the pipe drifting across the lake.

the day we drove out to a friend’s farm and used a chain fall to drag a dead horse out of it’s stall. The night in the barn, the hay smell and the horse smell and the death smell, all mixing with the smell of the Prince albert.

The day we hunted together the very first time, our Brittany spaniel herding quail to a spot so we could send her in to flush them, then drop them from the air- his Remington 870 and my Sears Roebuck 12 gauge single. The pipe clenched between his teeth, he sent the dog to get the birds, we cleaned them with our pocketknives and brought them home for dinner.

I rolled the pipe back up int he red rag and put it back into the toolbox. More another time.