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August 25, 2007

And to my grandson, I leave my suspenders

By TOM FINK, staff writer

There’s an old joke that asks why firemen wear red suspenders (in case you haven’t heard it, the answer is “to hold their pants up” — I didn’t say it was a clever joke, just old).

For about three weeks, I’ve had not one, but two pairs of suspenders as old as that joke in my desk drawer — one of which used to belong to my father, the other was my father’s father’s — odd legacies given to me the last time I visited my mother.

“Here,” she said, gladly handing me the pair of inherited men’s wear, “You’ll want to have these.”

Ummm ... I will?

I’m still not sure exactly why I would want them, but every day, I open my drawer, look at them, and wonder, “What in the name of Levi Strauss am I supposed to do with these?”

It bears mentioning, that my father’s been gone for more than 20 years now, and my grandpa died the week before I was born.

Grandpa Fink was known by the Sequoyah County folks as “Punch” back in the day before people even said “back in the day.”

He was a wiry scrap of a man — from German ancestors, lean and muscled from

a lifetime of hard labor; a man who raised

his sons like he was raised — to learn the meaning of hard work and ... well, that

was about it.

It’s never been said, but I can only assume “I love you” wasn’t said so much back then as it was shown — by providing meals for my dad and three uncles, now all deceased, and by staying with my grandmother.

His was a generation of men that didn’t express their feelings, unless those feelings happened to be anger or other such “manly” emotions. It was just the time.

Every story I’ve ever heard about my Grandpa Punch involved him being a gruff but witty character (must be genetic) — going the extra mile to help his Depression-era neighbors, even at the cost of doing without, himself.

And now, every day, his suspenders look up at me, looking strangely lost and out of time with their surroundings.

Sometimes I look at them — with their leather loops and elasticity gone — and wonder to myself if he was wearing them when my father was born, or when he left for college.

Or when he enlisted in the Navy to help fight in World War II.

I don’t know — I doubt I ever will, which is fine.

I’ll probably never do anything practical with Granpa Punch’s — or my dad’s — suspenders. So, I should just throw them away, and yet ...

Here’s the thing:

I’m equal parts sentimentalist and pragmatist, knowing there’s a certain sweetness in having momentos from yesteryear or yesterdecade.

At the same time, I understand it doesn’t take long for said bittersweet keepsakes to become what I refer to as “old junk cluttering up the house,” so I temper what I hang on to with some sensibility.

My son’s first grade papers? Keep.

My son’s first dirty diaper? Toss. It didn’t take me long to make that determination

Poems I wrote my wife while we were courting? Keep

Honey-do list from my wife last week? Toss, at least after everything on the list is done that is.

I’ve gotten to a point in life where I can appreciate the past for making me who I am — for the better or worse — and can let go of the physical and emotional parts of it that really are more incidental.

It’s good to look back so long as you’re not held back — and so long as what you’re looking back at doesn’t become “junk cluttering up your house.”

Or your mind, for that matter.

At this point, I’ve no idea where to put Grandpa Punch’s old suspenders — it crossed my mind to put them on eBay just as a curiosity, but I don’t think I will — sometimes, I find, you can be sentimental about something without even knowing why.

Who knows — maybe I’ll just use them to hold my pants up and retire my belt — which I’ll leave for my own grandchildren to inherit one day.

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