Grandpa’s candy stash

​I have a head full of jokes that are locked by keywords. I don’t know what the keywords are, but I’ll stop a conversation and start telling a joke when I hear one. 

     It’s the way my brain works: triggers and keywords. Today a couple of triggers pulled a memory or two out of cold storage, warmed them up, and set them free. 

     I built my son a workbench when he was six. Eleven years later, it’s still sitting inside my front door. The first trigger was a paint brush that was tinted yellow by the swing I painted last summer. It’s hanging from a hook on the pegboard.  The second trigger was a picture of an old John Deere tractor I saw in one of those vehicles for sale magazines. 

     My grandpa had a 1939 John Deere. In his garage there was a shelf above the ladder rack. It was packed with stuff. I have that in common with my grandpa. I have stuff, too. I haven’t found a use for much of the stuff, but I keep telling myself I will. 

     Back to grandpa’s shelf. He kept some paint cans up there. Three off them were very important, and he used them every year. They were a can of John Deere yellow, a can of John Deere Green, and a can of blaze orange. 

     Grandpa had a 1939 John Deere tractor and a 1965 Chevy truck. He painted them both by hand every summer. He’d wait until late morning when the sun had heated up the metal of the truck or tractor. Very carefully, he’d hand paint them with the paint that he’d also left out in the sun. 

    When he was done, you could barely see the brush strokes. The heat of the sun made the paint smooth out before it dried. I have no idea how man coats of paint were on that old truck and tractor, but they always looked freshly painted. 

     I don’t have any pictures of the truck or tractor. I need to go through my mom’s pictures and scan them. Mom and Dad took a lot of pictures over the years. There are probably hundreds of triggers in their photo albums.