I unwrapped it right there on the workbench, and I had to put both hands flat down on that bench to hold myself up, because my father, the hardest man I ever knew, had kept my baby things in an ammo can under a layer of rusty nails for fifty years.
A little hospital bracelet, the paper kind, with my name and my birth weight and a date from nineteen fifty-four. A curl of soft baby hair tied off with a bit of thread. A pair of tiny knitted booties. And a photograph, worn soft from being handled, of a young man in work clothes holding a newborn like the baby was made out of glass, and that young hard-faced man was my father, and the look on his face was something I never once saw on him in fifty years of being his son. Wide open. Undefended. Purely in love.
He never told me he was proud of me. Not one time that I can remember. He was a plant man with hard hands and no soft words, and I grew up sure I never once measured up to whatever it was he wanted from me, and I carried that my whole life, right up until I stood in his garage at seventy years old and found out he had been carrying my baby hair around in a welded ammo can the entire time.
There was a note down in the bottom, in his blocky print, just a few lines. My own daddy never told me he was proud, and I never learned the words for it. But I kept these from the day they first put you in my arms. You were the best work I ever did. If you found this, then you know now the thing I could never make my mouth say out loud. I was proud of you every single day, son.
I sat down on his old shop stool and cried like the newborn in that photograph. All those years I read his silence as disappointment in me. And the whole time the tenderest thing that man owned, the softest secret of his whole hard life, was a curl of my baby hair and a picture of the day he fell in love with his boy, hidden in the toughest thing in the garage, an ammo can, because that is where a hard man puts what he cannot afford to let anybody see.
I have grandkids of my own now. Two boys. And I made myself a promise, sitting there on that stool with my own baby hair in my hand. The silence stops with me. My daddy could not say it, and his daddy could not say it, and it cost every one of us so much, all those men loving each other and never once managing the words. My grandsons are going to hear it from me, out loud, until they are good and sick of hearing it. I am proud of you. I love you. My father taught me that, in the end, from the bottom of a nail can. Fifty years too late for the two of us, but right on time for them.