Something that came through on Father's Day, when we invited people to write about their fathers' tools on the Web site, was this recurring theme of fathers who could never be what they wanted to be, a generation of men who lost out, who had to do what was expected of them".
After he died, the writer and his brothers divided up their father's tools.
He grew up, he says, "in the corners between my father's tools and my mother's studio".
He gathered bits of wood, and used his father's tools to carve tiny animals — birds, lizards, that sort of thing — which he kept in a box under his bed.
Other pieces allude to his mother's quilts, to his father's tools, to farm animals and folk amulets, with all of this individual history embedded in a broader one symbolized by manaclelike bracelets and astrological symbols.
Just the other day, I was drawn to hold some of my father's tools, now that he's gone.
His father, a tool-and-die maker, was an immigrant from Slovenia who spoke five languages; his mother was an immigrant from Saxony, in what is now southeastern Germany.
In 1924, Kartodikromo published Rasa Merdika (A Sense of Independence), which dealt with a young man who goes against his priyayi father, a tool of the Dutch colonial government, and tries to find personal independence.
It all began with a four-year jail sentence for charges stemming from DeFriest's "theft" of his late father's tool collection (to which he was the rightful heir) before his dad's will was probated.
DANNIJO jewelry is run by two sisters, Danielle and Jodie Snyder, who learned how to do wirework by playing with their father's medical tools in Jacksonville, Fla.
