My grandfather was a painter. Not the artistic kind. The industrial kind. The residential kind. He was also the child of Depression-era parents. I've been told, and it seems to be true from my experience of him, that people from that era did not let things go to waste.
He wasn't exactly a hoarder, but he rarely got rid of anything that he thought had the slightest utility. His shop was full of old fishing rods, bicycles, scraps of metal, car parts, and tools.
He was always outside amongst the things most people would call junk; tinkering and shuffling things around, welding or cutting, making repairs. I loved that about him. I love that about him.
One time he brought home some very large steel drums. We call them barrels. They look exactly like the kind of barrels you imagine crude oil traveling in: large black cylinders, ribbed, sealed on both ends with a little circular pour spout. They were massive to a child. My brother and I could have easily fit inside of one.
I don't know what he intended them to be, but what I do know is that to my brother and me, they looked like very large toys.
We would put our soda cans on top of them and shoot them with our BB guns. We would push them around and chase each other, trying to run each other over. And of course, there was this ever-present challenge: to tip it on its side, climb on top, and attempt to maintain your balance.
It took some time, but not as much as you might think. Before we knew it, we were experts at standing on them. After that, the progression was rapid. We went from looking like baby deer trying to stand for the first time to vaulting onto them from the ground and sticking the landing.
Even our black lab, Sadie (the runt of her litter) would jump on with us. She also became an expert.
And what are you to do once you've mastered standing on a barrel? You move it, of course. It's a little bit counterintuitive at first, because if you want the barrel to go forward, you have to walk like you're walking backwards. But in no time at all, you can walk it anywhere. And after that? It's off to the races.
Love you, Pa.