Memory- sharpened

Vroom!! The #42 car with Hopper behind the wheel

Being a territory manager had some odd perks, but perks nonetheless. When the branch had its location across from Auto Club Speedway on Cherry Ave in Fontana, Gary would sometimes open the yard on Saturdays and sell sheds to people driving by.  It was fairly lucrative in the days prior to the sales done now through Costco Roadshows.

One Saturday a couple of years ago, Gary lined up a promoter to bring in a race car from Irwindale Speedway who wanted more exposure for his car.  They unloaded the car from the trailer and invited Gary to sit in it for a few minutes. Gary had to climb through the window and was surprised at how sparse the inside was. He was given two passes to drive a race car on the track over in Irwindale.  He never wanted to use the passes for some reason though.  I guess his 'need for speed' was satisfied that day on his parking lot. I snapped this photo of him but never kept the original, instead shrinking it down to use as an icon for my yahoo account.  Its 3rd generation and very grainy/pixely, but I wanted to show off a picture of Gary that most have never seen, and one that I took for granted until recently.

>sigh<

I am surprised at how I can sometimes go for a day without being sad to the core, then something minor will just expose a nerve. Today it was pencils. Pencils!
We have all these pencils in the house that one picks up wherever, whenever.  Most of them are pretty old, printed with names like Frisbee Plumbing, Daniels-Olsen Building Products, Fullerton Building Products, LifeSource organ donation. These pencils go back to the cabinet business days in Sioux Falls. There are some newer ones like County of Ventura HICAP. I recall the day we got that one because our PD group got a bus ride to a seminar there.
One thing I remember is Gary always held the pencil he was using in his mouth while he worked so as to have it handy when he needed it again.  Therefore, most of our pencils have Gary's teeth marks on them. 
Another common trait these pencils have is that the majority of them resided in a koozy out in the garage on one of Gary's toolboxes.  He has a small wire shelf on the side where these pencils, plus a few flat carpenter pencils with Hopper Cabinet Company on them sat waiting to be used to mark cuts or figure math equations on whatever he was building for the house. Some of these pencils migrated over time inside the house where I grab them and use them if they are sharp enough.
I was noticing that many were short, dull or had broken leads.  I got out the electric sharpener and started making clean new points on them, when I noticed that a few had been hand sharpened by Gary using one of the 20+ retractable knives he has out in the garage.  Only after I had sharpened up about 3 of those pencils did I stop and think about what I had done.  I ERASED Gary's handiwork on the pencils!  Its so dumb, but I feel horrible about it.  I went out and found more pencils that he had hand sharpened this way.  I studied them and thought about how his hands were the last ones that had held the pencil before mine do now. I was so sad that this little piece of him is gone on the pencils I have sharpened.
Because I don't have Gary anymore, the things he touched take on major importance to me.  I look back on receipts that he signed (if you can call a loop and a line a signature) and I just MISS the person whose hands left these mementos of himself everywhere.  I want to see and hold those hands again that worked so hard and were always banged up and roughened from being used so much.

I went to a grief group last week which, surprising to me, had 14 widowed persons that evening. One of the group members was bothered that after only a month after losing their spouse, they felt numb and were unable to cry. They had to drive past the hospital where their loved one had died each morning and evening but all they felt was a deep depression and not grief.  The counselor suggested that grief takes its time and we can't control how long it lasts or when it comes and goes.  It ebbs and flows precisely because humans can't absorb the pain of the loss in a specific time period all at once.  Our capacity to grieve is only acheieved in bites; sometimes small, sometimes large, but never all in one sitting.  The counselor asked others what they do to jumpstart feeling grief when they need to.  One woman said she listens to music. Others said to touch and feel items of clothing or toiletries of the spouse.
My answer now to this person, would be to go through their junk drawer and look at the odd little things their spouse kept.  Maybe like Gary,  they too, sharpened their pencils by hand, leaving a mark on a heart's memory.