Scraps and Strings

Ever so often while taking a walk on Polk Street towards the Pier I used to pass a house with its garage door open.

I used to sneak a peek into the beautiful garage and the wonderful keepsakes it had. It was probably like any other garage but something about it made it different.

There used to be someone perched up under a vintage-looking car working on it.

Never saw the beautiful car come out of the garage or maybe I missed it. I am not much of a car person, they don’t really do so much to me.

But I always thought about this beauty every time I passed the garage and thought of the person perched up beneath her wheels working on her.

I think she was a remodeled car, made from a vintage body.

I visualized the person spending their weekends working on her. Maybe having a few beers, people watching on the sunny side of Polk at the intersection of Polk and Chestnut, in between doing craftwork on their vintage beauty.

I used to think how much my dad might love a life like that.

A garage full of keepsakes and all the mechanical instruments his hands want to touch. The feel of metal on his fingertips and drills and nuts and bolts and bits and pieces of iron he’d like to surround himself with!

I never stopped to talk to the person in the garage. I never asked about the car, or why it never seemed to leave its space. But that small, quiet world they’d carved out for themselves on Polk Street—it stayed with me. Not because of what it was, but because of what it stirred in me. Memories of my dad’s hands, always working, always moving. His love of machines and keepsakes and little bits of iron that others might overlook.

I always thought about my dad when I walked past that garage.

Since I moved back in with my parents, my dad has acquired a few curious habits. He wakes up in the wee hours of the morning, when the house is still dark and quiet, and does mysterious things. He moves around the house gathering bits and pieces of discarded material, things out of the trash, little scraps others wouldn’t think twice about. If we disturb him—ask if everything’s okay—he’ll quickly pretend to drink some water, then hurry off to his tinkering, as if we hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary.

But then, slowly, the evidence appears. I’ll find bits of scrap material hidden beneath his bed, styrofoam tucked beneath his pillow like a secret treasure. And then there are the results of his quiet labor, scattered throughout the house in quiet corners. Broken scissors transformed into knives. Random scraps turned into cleaning supplies. Cloth fragments stitched into objects you can’t quite identify until, days or weeks later, he finds some ingenious use for them.

I can’t help but draw a connection between his midnight creations and that stranger under the car on Polk Street. Both of them are cut from the same cloth—people who see the potential in what others throw away. People who find joy in the act of creating, of transforming, of making something new from what’s been discarded. My dad doesn’t just fix things; he breathes life back into them. A kind of quiet magic, a love that takes shape in broken scissors, cloth scraps, and quiet corners of the house.

And I suppose, in a way, that stranger in the garage gave me a piece of my dad to carry with me on my walks. A thread of connection to the kind of life he’s always lived. A life that isn’t about big dreams or grand gestures, but about the small joys—the feel of metal on his fingertips, the hum of the world just outside the door, and the quiet satisfaction of making something with his own two hands.