Readers Who Write

Animal friendship is a warm thing. Anyone who has ever bonded with a dog knows what I am talking about. The warmth of that kind of friendship runs deep.

I’ve had a pretty good friendship going for 50 years now. Obviously, it’s not a dog. While nothing can top the friendship with my wife, I do have another friend that has stuck by my side even longer in the best of times and the worst of times.

The day I turned 18, I joined the carpenters union. I built myself a long toolbox that would easily hold the length of my hand saws and other assorted hand tools. Very quickly, my toolbox was pushing 70 pounds. It may sound funny to some, but that toolbox and the special tools inside have blossomed into a friendship I value to this day.

In my younger years, I would sling that 70 pounds up on my right shoulder and carry it from wherever I was allowed to park my pickup to the job site for that day. Many days, that involved walking a distance and then climbing 150 feet straight up scaffolding ladders to the falsework or deck of whatever bridge I was involved in building.

For a couple months, my crew and I were forming a large concrete spiral staircase outside the Los Angeles Trade Center. I was assigned a very small dirt parking area five blocks away that butted up against the Hollywood Freeway in a tangle of brush.

At the start and end of each work day, I’d hoist my 70-pound toolbox on my right shoulder, and we’d share the five blocks of sidewalk with white collars and delightful secretaries. On one particular day, after I got back to my truck at the end of the work day, I noticed what looked like an interesting pile of stuff kind of hidden at the front of my truck. Turned out to be another victim attributed to the Hillside Strangler. My toolbox and I unfortunately had a front row seat to the grizzly aftermath from those days of terror in L.A.

Every carpenter gets requests from friends of friends of friends for evening and weekend work. I was no different.

One Saturday, I found myself installing a heavy asbestos-filled wood fire door in the back of a small store. It was located right downtown L.A. where the sun never shines. I parked in the tiny alley directly behind the store where I would be working just feet away. After knocking out an opening and installing the frame, I wrestled the fire door temporarily in place from inside the store so I could mark for the hinges.

The door was only positioned for two minutes blocking the path to my truck, but that was the two minutes used by at least two opportunistic thieves who made off with every piece of power equipment I had in my truck. But they left my 70-pound toolbox filled with hand tools behind.

I once signed on the dotted line to volunteer myself and my 70 pounds of hand tools to travel to Haiti for two months. I accompanied 32 teenagers, each volunteering their summer to build a church building.

Before I left, I spray painted each tool in the toolbox with a spot of red so I could always quickly identify my tools. Turned out, I did not need to do that — my tools were the only tools these 32 teenagers had available to them.

Two months later, a beautiful church stood proud in the most rural of areas. My tools were busy and abused. Those teens mixed and poured a footer and slab of concrete 90-feet-by-30-feet. Then they laid concrete block around the perimeter 10 feet heigh. Metal trusses and a metal roof later, my toolbox full of hand tools and myself headed for home.

Tools don’t die, so their friendship still beckons me from my garage. They are not as busy now like in the good old days, but I sometimes open up that toolbox and fondly hold one of those cold metal tools in my hand. The memories always come flooding back. So many places, so many applications, so many adventures.

Who says friends can’t be cold?

So you say you want to write?

Go for it.

Send us 500 or so words of scintillating copy. Make it funny. Make it poignant. Make it count. Make it any way you want.

Just don’t cuss. Don’t be boring. And have a point.

If we like it, we’ll run it.

Email submissions to community@rv-times.com. Put “Readers Who Write” in the subject line, and tell us the city where you live.