Epilogue
The Tackle Box
When I was a teenager, I bought my dad a yellow tackle box. He never really used it for fishing. Instead, he kept car titles, papers, and all kinds of odds and ends in it. It became one of those places where things just ended up over time.
Years after he passed away, my mama gave that tackle box to me. I brought it home and set it aside, and every now and then I’d open it up and look through what was inside. Over the years, I added a few things of my own, and it became a place for memories.
There was one item in there that always puzzled me—an old harmonica with no top and no bottom, just the reeds.
I’d pick it up from time to time and wonder why Daddy had kept it. He never played harmonica, and as far as I knew, he never owned one. Still, there it was.
I thought about it more than once over the years, but I never came up with an answer, so I’d put it back and close the box.
Then one day, I was going through it again. I picked up that old harmonica and held it in my hands, and just like that, it all came back.
A young boy sitting on a hickory stump, messing with a broken harmonica, trying to figure out how to make it sound like something.
“Shouting on the Hills of Glory.”
That harmonica—it was the same one.
All those years, and I never put it together, but there it was, the very thing I learned on, the very thing that started it all.
And somehow, Daddy had kept it.
I don’t know if he ever thought about it the way I do now, or if he remembered that day the same way I do, but I believe he held onto it for a reason. Maybe it reminded him of that moment, of me sitting out there on that stump, trying to make something out of nothing.
Maybe it made him proud.
I never asked him. I never thought to.
But I think I understand now.
That old harmonica wasn’t just something broken he held onto. It was a memory, and maybe it meant as much to him as it does to me.