A Satchel Full of Memories

            Shortly after my grandfather’s death my father came up from the basement and placed an old black satchel on the living room floor between us as we sat on the couch. It had belonged to

his father, my PopPop.  Its leather was cracked and flaking with age, leading me to wonder if this satchel had made the crossing from Sweden to America in 1911.

            Inside the satchel were the memories of three lifetimes.  My grandfather’s memories were known in part from the stories he told.  The rest we could surmise from the contents of the bag:

a Baptismal record, World War I discharge papers, an obituary in Swedish announcing his mother’s funeral. My father’s memories of the man whose effects we examined were more plentiful, like the time PopPop locked a drunken friend in the basement because he didn’t like the way the man had spoken to his wife and daughter, who were guests at my grandmother’s table. Or the time PopPop replaced the grape juice Nana was planning to put in the punch she was going to serve some ladies from church with elderberry wine, making for a lively afternoon!

            My memories were of shorter duration: The sawdust smelling man who lathered up a four-

year-old face and handed me a bladeless razor so I could shave beside him at the soapstone sink in the basement as he cleaned up after a day at work.  Saturday nights passed playing games of “shineese sheckers,” while listening to the console radio across the room as Jack Wyrtzen evangelized from Scroon Lake, New York. The first memory of a grown man bursting into tears when he mentioned his wife’s name one winter Sunday after she died.

            Sorting through the contents of the satchel my father and I found rings of gold once given

and received in token and pledge of love by two young immigrants.  We handled pictures and postcards from people and places we had heard about in stories told at the Sunday dinner table. We wondered at the contents of letters written in a language we could not read.  We felt the coolness of a glass paper-weight from Narragansett Pier, talked of stories attached to a Carpenter’s Union pin, and marveled at the way the monogram had worn smooth on PopPop’s workday pocket watch.

            Buried at the bottom of the satchel among all these things was a little notebook showing the same well-used qualities as the pocket watch and the old, black bag.  Penciled and penned on its pages were dates and names and monetary amounts for each month spanning several years. My father recognized some of the names as belonging to missionary families whose pictures were often taped by the calendar in PopPop’s kitchen.  Some of the entries listed a place name or a project. A dollar here, a dollar there, and five, ten or twenty next to the others.  The giver and the giving unknown except by those who received the gifts.

            What we had unearthed at the bottom of the satchel was a diary of stewardship. A record of giving.  A testimony of love.  One nine-and-a-half fingered carpenter responding to those serving another carpenter with nail-scarred hands.  The little book became a posthumous challenge to those of us in the generations born on this side of the Atlantic.  A life need not wait to be spent in one impressive sum spelled out in a will.  Better to deposit many installments of quiet gratitude, doing a lot with a little over a lifetime, ever responding to the needs of the least, the last, and the lost loved by the Carpenter from Nazareth.