I HAD HEARD other baby boomers speak of this time, and now it was mine - time to help the Greatest Generation move to the next horizon. So on a gloomy day, about a week before the movers are to come, I stand in the old man's workshop, lined floor to ceiling with steel and wooden tools, some of them handmade, from his 50 years as the family's chief handyman. I hold a heavy, gritty, oily object in my hands - a belt grinder - and the old man, who can no longer lift the thing himself, announces that it must go to the new house in the retirement community.
"They don't make them like that anymore," the old man says. "You don't want to throw a thing like that away. You know how much something like that cost today? Forget about it. Put 'em in the box."
I place the motor, the belt and the grinder itself in a wooden box. My hands are dirty, and I wipe them on a rag, also dirty. The old man directs me to the next object - an electric grinder.
"This one is even better than the other one," he says, his accent still thickly French. "I sharpen all my knives with that. Put 'em in the box."
It's a cloudy, chilly morning in the mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania. Louie, my father-in-law, is preparing for departure. After 30 years in the country paradise he'd made for himself - a solidly built brick rancher on 7 acres surrounded by woods and farm ("Like old country") -- he has decided to scale back and move on. A modern house in a smartly planned retirement community near Hanover, Pa., awaits.
"You know what that is?" Louie says, pointing to a foot-wide wooden spool of wire, enough for an apartment complex.
"Telephone wire?" I guess.
"That's it. Put 'em in the box."
Everything that goes to the new place goes in a box.
Everything that stays behind - to be sold to neighbors, or left by the roadside for scavengers - goes onto a trailer outside the workshop. The trailer fills slowly. Louie cannot seem to part with much.
"Are you sure you want all this?" I ask, pointing to a patch of neatly wrapped nylon ropes hanging in a corner of the shop. "And what about all these extension cords?"
"Put 'em in the box."
I don't try to talk him out of taking all these items to the new place. Louie is in deep sorrow about the move - "Is not my house anymore" - so I'm careful to be quiet and obedient. I don't ask questions, unless I know it's something that might delight him.
"Louie," I say at one point, "you remember the blue pliers?"
