What’s Bringing Me Joy: Klein Tools Canvas Bags

On my most recent trip to Tennessee, I was looking for something in my dad’s old workspace, and I came across these canvas tool bags made by Klein.

They were just sitting on a shelf, two of them stuffed into the third, and I immediately wanted them. For what purpose, I didn’t know. But I asked my mom if she would care if I had them, and when she said she didn’t, they came back to Columbia with me.

I don’t know if I’m necessarily a natural fit to have these bags, considering their purpose. I’m not exactly the handy type (though a part of me desperately wishes I were). It was (to me) a running joke when my dad (probably not joking) would say he had the perfect gift idea for me: a drill, a miter saw, or some highly specific tool he’d been talking about recently for some project he was doing.

I always laughed it off, said I didn’t want or need anything like that, and that if I had to guess, he was just suggesting it so he could “borrow” it from me. He’d laugh, but also say that everybody needs a fill-in-the-blank.

I didn’t have it in me to get through the question to my mom, but part of me desperately wanted to ask: Did he ever say anything about having a nincompoop for a son when it comes to tools?

I think I’ll continue to struggle with the differences between him and me, wondering, pointlessly, what life and our relationship might have been like if I were a little bit more handy, a little bit more inclined to such things, a little bit more like my little brother.

I couldn’t get the question out because I couldn’t overcome choking on the words and stifling tears at the same time, but on another level, I knew the question would be fruitless. Because I don’t actually think my dad ever said anything about me being a dunderhead with tools. I don’t think he thought, and even if he had, I don’t think he was the type to put words to it.

I just wanted something positive and affirming of our differences, something from him, that recognized we seemed to be cut from different cloth but how that was OK all the same, that he never looked at it as a failing of mine or wished I were any different.

In reality, I should take more solace in the part of me that knows the thoughts and comments weren’t in him because that is all the proof I need that he didn’t feel that way. But call it a fathers-and-sons thing: We want something, anything, after they’re gone to tell us they didn’t make nearly as much out of our perceived shortcomings as we did. To feel seen for what we are and what we aren’t and loved anyway.

As you may be able to deduce, we didn’t say the deeper, harder things. It wasn’t our way, but there is a part of me that wishes it had been. We said the big things, the “miss yous” and “I love yous,” but in those dwindling days, I couldn’t get through big speeches to unload all that I’d never get a chance to say again.

And when I didn’t, it led to all sorts of wonderings, pitiful yearnings to uncover something that might feel like an unspoken trove on his side of things, too. Even when asking would have been sad and largely unfair to my mom, who likely wouldn’t have had an answer and would have seen me wrestling with my emotions, trying to figure out what to say (and probably becoming quite sad herself).

All of that to say: I really just like these rugged, colorful bags. Looking at them makes me miss my dad, but they also make me feel close to him, like a little bit of him resides in his possessions. I know I feel that way about the gifts he gave me. Having them close is a comfort, and that’s not nothing. The bags don’t have anything in them just yet, but I’m thinking perhaps some art supplies, which make possible hobbies that Dad and I actually did share.

And who knows? Maybe one day I’ll know what I’m doing well enough to justify buying so many tools that these bags, sure to stand the test of time, might just be the perfect home for them.