Little Black Book

Chewing Gum. $.15

Bandaids $1.49

Toothpicks .45

The neat columns fill page after page in the black notebook. His handwriting was strong, even flamboyant, but disciplined and meticulous at the same time. Like him. A raconteur, a bon vivant who enjoyed a glass of beer, would throw back his head and laugh with friends, but also a competitive athlete, a man who methodically performed his physical exercises every morning and read every book twice through in case he had missed something the first time. There are dozens of notebooks in this cabinet, because my father wrote down every penny he spent. He gave my mother the same gift every birthday and Valentine's Day. He filled the three family cars with gas every Saturday.

I am so different, the child who looked the most like him but always marched to an alien beat. And now I am left to deal with it, to pack away these remnants of a life. The clothes are easy - I've already sorted them into bags for the Salvation Army. Bags of darned socks, shirts and suits gradually replaced by the sweatpants and T-shirts of retirement and old age. He never threw anything away. Maybe we are not so different after all, as I don't either. But these old photos? The box of his father's war medals? These records and notebooks? Should I go through each one or grab a trash bag and make a complete sweep of it all? I randomly open another book. Here the writing has begun to deteriorate, symptomatic of that gradual decline that had marred his last years. The once impeccable memory struggling to find words, breathing labored now and hands shaking. ,There are mistakes in the addition, angry slashes through the figures.

Chewing gum $1.25

Pasquaney trunk $1,000

. Pasquaney trunk, $1,000. I'm jarred to attention, because this seems so wrong, so out of place. My father would never make an expenditure of that kind, that magnitude, so carelessly. I know what the Pasquaney trunk is, and where. It was the trunk he took to camp as a boy, then later on college basketball trips. For years it had lived in the basement in a storage room, full of old team uniforms, letter jackets , trophies, albums. He would not have bought another Camp Pasquaney trunk, and if he had, it could not have cost $1000. .Could he have put the $1000 in the trunk?

Intrigued now, i abandon the piled notebooks and climb down the stairs to the basement. This would have been hard for him, in his eighies with congestive heart failure. The trunk is where I remembered if, in the very back of the closet. I had taken refuge from high school here one afternoon, and spent the hours looking through the fraternity scrapbooks, newspaper articles and team photos. They are still there - more saved treasures for me to put...where? I lift a large photo album and then I see the money. It is in neat, tidy stacks. Twenty stacks of ten hundreddollar bills. Twenty thousand dollars.

I think of my father, saving this money, putting it aside here. He had bank accounts, and left us very conservative and conventional investments. And of course this house,which some young family would probably buy, for two hundred times what he had paid for it, and raze to the ground. To build something newer, more efficient, without a basement sump or creaky stairs. This money seems so out of character, My fingers cradle the coach's whistle he wore to every game when I was a child. And then the money makes sense to me; he was just conserving things, taking care of us. Fillling the gas tanks one more time.