Swiss Army Knife

I don't remember if I was 11 or 12. My father had a slim little brown pocket knife, single blade and very sharp. But I was fascinated by the bright red Swiss Army knives the Lebanese proprieter displayed in his shop. Five dollars was a lot of money, though. I certainly didn't have that much.

One day my father brought home a beautiful knife. It had a main blade that I could barely pry out with my fingernail, a sharper small blade, a screwdriver/bottle-opener, a can opener, a pair of scissors, toothpick, tiny tweezers, corkscrew, and a hole-poker thing that I never knew the name of. I carried it everywhere.

I was playing with the other MKs in a tree. When I came home the knife was gone. I retraced my steps and searched thoroughly, but nothing showed. Other people had gone by in the interim; it was well and truly lost--at least as far as I was concerned. No doubt somebody knew where it was.

I was disconsolate, of course. My father let things stand for a while--possibly to drive home a point about keeping track of things. About three months later, he gave me another, smaller knife--without the scissors or tweezers or toothpick (a silly thing -- how would you keep it clean?).

The logo fell off years ago leaving a little hole, and the plastic has a little crack at one end. The finish is matte now after 53 years of pocket riding. The corkscrew has been in two corks--it's really too short for that sort of thing--but has pulled hundreds of staples and started any number of drill holes. The hole-poker thing is the only one that is hard to prise out these days--it has done a lot of reaming and making holes in cardboard and soft wood. The knives and screwdriver have seen lots of use, and the can-opener has a tip tiny enough to work into a lot of phillips screws. The frame has a dent where I used it to pound on a stuck lever. (Nothing else was handy.)

I never did get the hang of, or interest in, whittling--except when I needed to get something to fit. I did remember the "always cut away from yourself," and I think I jabbed myself once (lightly) in all those years--with the corkscrew. And when I was reaming the pokey tool bit me once. That's not too bad for years of food cutting, box opening, scraping, fingernail cleaning, screwdriving, prying out broken lightbulbs, screwing a NIM crate into a relay rack, and other obvious jobs.

A lot of my life is connected to my father's gift. It has always been "just there"--I'm pretty sure it was in my pocket on my wedding day.

Yes, it went to school with me. But not to Switzerland.