Pamela Jean Owens off-line

Daddy loved to measure things. Anything. Everything. I’m sure I always knew that on some level, but it never hit me with such certitude as when my brother and I were sorting and packing the contents of the house where we grew up. I spent most of last summer in Dallas packing, after helping Mother “downsize” to a small retirement apartment in assisted living. We had moved Daddy to nursing care nearly three years earlier, but we’d never sorted through all that much from Daddy’s things in the meantime, except for paper and computer clutter that was collecting dust and clearly had no value to anyone.

What remained, what I spent a summer sorting and packing, was all that Mother had deemed of enough value to keep. Anything that Daddy had loved. And a lot that had simply accumulated over the years. Quite a bit of it was art, of one form or another. Items purchased on their travels, each with a story I’ve heard many times. Paintings, prints, lots and lots of miscellanea and bits of this and that.

For Daddy, the slide rule was a work of art. I lost count of the number of slide rules I found as I was packing: six-inch ones, twelve-inch ones, thick ones and thin ones, expensive ones and ones that had been “giveaways” from someone with whom Daddy had done business. I already knew Daddy had lots of slide rules. And I knew he had lots of rulers and yardsticks and tape measures. And I knew he had lots of triangles and t-squares and other drawing aids. I always loved the “mechanical drawing” sets he had, with their ultra-fine line pencils, their precision compasses and protractors, their little containers of leads and of erasers. He let me use them when I took geometry and solid geometry in high school, but I had to be very careful and could not take them with me to school. Fortunately, Daddy had two drawing sets, as those seemed to be the only items in the entire house that my brother and I both seriously wanted to keep.

And I also knew Daddy loved clocks. He never stopped mourning the loss of his grandfather’s clock, and he always blamed his mother for discarding it, along with his high school yearbooks and other treasures of memory. The tragedy happened when Daddy was away at college and the family had to move in a hurry because their rent-house was sold out from under them. I suspect it was a very traumatic time for my grandmother, a time I never heard about in detail but that always seemed to hover in the air and drive her desire to make a permanent home for Papaw.

Last summer, when I was going through my grandmother’s “things,” things that had eventually become boxes in the tops of Mother and Daddy’s guestroom closet, I discovered a box marked “Mother’s treasures.” The box had been labeled, I think, by my Dad, probably when he packed up his parents’ house after Papaw died, when Mamaw had to move to a nursing home to live out her remaining years.

That box of Mamaw’s treasures reminded me that, ever since I left home for college, I have had a box or two marked “Pammy’s treasures.” I’m guessing now that Daddy labeled them when he helped me pack for college. The boxes are filled with memories, not gold or jewelry or anything else that a stranger might expect to find in a box marked “treasures.” One box has a little doll made of soap that Aunt Mattie gave me with a bath set when I was about 10 or 12. Last time I unpacked that box, last time we moved, I saw that two tiny plastic dolls had become dismembered, as the tiny elastics holding their arms and legs to their bodies had rotted away. Those are what Daddy labeled as my “treasures.” A Valentine from my aunt that opens into a ballerina that sits up all by itself. Daddy recognized a treasure when he saw it.

The treasure is not so much the dolls themselves, or the Valentine, or the soap. I do love the little dolls, for example, but they are treasures because each one wears a tiny dress adorned with lace and a fastener, one dress with a little tie and the other with two tiny snaps, lovingly made by my grandmother. One time when my boxes were stored in an unused room in the church where I was pastor, I discovered that the box of my treasures had been opened and gone through. That was the first time it occurred to me that a stranger might see the label and presume the box was of monetary value. What a very strange idea that seemed to me to be.

As I sorted through Mamaw’s dusty boxes, I could tell that her treasures were similar to my own. Inside a large box, she had a small box containing the cards that had come with baby gifts when my dad was a newborn in 1922. Every single one of Daddy’s grade school and high school report cards seemed to be there. And a box with his tin G-man badge and similar sorts of tiny boyhood treasures was there as well. Clearly Mamaw was not at all the sort of woman who would have deliberately discarded any box containing treasured memories, whether they belonged to her, or to her husband, or most especially to her treasured only child, my dad.

My guess, and I so wish Daddy were still in his full mind so that I could tell him this, is that Mamaw or Papaw carefully packed the treasures they saw in Daddy’s room, when they had to move so suddenly, and that one of them lovingly labeled it “Tom Jr.’s Treasures.” And then, I feel very certain, movers came to put the boxes on a truck and transport them to the family’s new residence. Somewhere along the way, whether when the boxes were sitting on the sidewalk at the old house, or when they were being loaded or unloaded from the truck, or even when they were about to be safely deposited in the new house, someone saw the label “Tom Jr.’s Treasures.” Whoever that was, whether a mover or a neighbor or just a passer-by, must have thought the contents of that box would be worth money, worth selling. And so the box disappeared.

The depression was not long over, and people were still desperate. I can understand how it happened. Possibly Mamaw and Papaw did not even know the box was missing. Perhaps they put all of Daddy’s boxes in his new room, to wait for him to come home and unpack them. It may have been months before the loss was discovered, or it may have been only days. I’m sure I will never, in this life, know for sure.

I am pretty sure that Daddy will go to his grave without forgiving his mother for losing his treasures, especially his grandfather’s clock. I do not know if he ever even told her how upset he was, or if she tried to explain, or if the whole affair was one of those events his generation left unsaid. I do hope that, when they meet in heaven, Daddy and Mamaw can clear the air, and perhaps in Daddy’s mansion his grandfather’s clock will once again sit on his dresser, next to his high school yearbooks and other lost treasures.

And I realize now, after carefully packing enough grandfather clocks to give one to each of my children, as well as keep one for me and another for my brother, that Daddy never stopped looking for his own grandfather’s clock. Every flea market, every junk store he visited, as he so loved to do — each one must have sheltered the possibility that Daddy would finally be reunited with his boyhood treasures. Every grandfather clock he collected stood in for, but never replaced, the clock of his grandfather’s that he missed so much.