My Uncle and Aunt gave me a set of socket spanners for my twenty-first birthday. It was a good quality set, Australian made in the days before China had been invented, when cheap stuff came from Japan. It came with a lifetime warranty, and was a revelation for one used to making do with ill fitting spanners that slipped and stripped nuts and skinned knuckles. Those spanners and I have rebuilt car engines and fixed outboard motors and adjusted garage doors, and I shamefully admit that the ratchet head might even have whacked an odd bolt into place over the years when I was too lazy, or in latter times too sore and stiff to reach for a hammer.
We were involved in a hefty car accident at one point which resulted in sockets and other bits being sprayed in all directions across a city intersection, but we searched amid inner city traffic and recovered them all. A bit of panel beating was all that was required to return the case to a reasonable semblance of its former self although the little cracks in the moulded packing live on almost half a century later.
All of which is a long winded way of getting to the unavoidable bit: Auntie Dawn left us today at the end of a lengthy spell on this planet. We were mostly on the outer fringes of each other's lives yet close in that intangible way that Aunties and Uncles and nephews who take a genuine interest in each other's goings-on are. Our families had shared holidays when we were growing up, we'd even moved in with them a couple of times when our family was temporarily displaced. As a student I would do my washing at their place, and she'd admonish me for the way I hung it out. "They'll never dry" she'd exclaim, but they always did.
As life moved on our paths crossed less frequently, but that sparkle was always there when they did, and it's fair to say that just as I have ever since I received their precious gift, I'll think of them both every time I pull out that socket set until the warranty on it too, finally expires.
1 comment
Sorry to hear about your aunty, Peter.
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