By JEFFERSON WEAVER
Staff writer

The young man stood to his mother’s left, helping unload the shopping cart and keep his toddling sister in her seat.

One by one, the purchases were flashed across the scanner, a pretty typical summertime mélange of lawn and garden supplies, along with a few other bits and pieces any forward-thinking mom might buy now, months before school starts back.

One of the items caught my eye as the clerk handed it back. The mother immediately gave it to the young man, who almost seemed to take a deep breath as he slipped it into his pocket.

He tried not to smile, since that might not be a grownup thing to do when you get your first pocketknife.

I was pretty sure a rite of passage had officially occured. Few things are more important than a boy’s first pocketknife, and I fear far too few parents buy their children pocketknives anymore.

I would have liked to tell the woman she was a good mom.

I was about that fellow’s age when I got my first knife, a sheep’s foot Barlow from Miss Mamie’s hardware store. Miss Mamie never seemed to have anything you needed (“I’ll be getting that next week,” was a standing joke in town) but she did have a wide selection of pocketknives.

I don’t mean the cheap, gimcrack things most stores now call pocketknives, pieces of junk stamped out in some Far Eastern scrap-metal sweat shop. I mean real pocketknives.

Papa let me pick one from the display, and after presenting Miss Mamie a now-forgotten sum of money (not a lot, by today’s standards) he handed it to me. That knife rode in my front right pocket for years before being replaced.

I would be lost without at least one, possibly two, in my pocket on any given day. I usually carry a complicated Swiss folder (again, a real Victorinox, not one of those cheap things), and it oftentimes has a simpler companion. I cannot recall a time since Papa handed me that horn-handled Barlow that I have gone without a knife in my pocket for more than a few hours, and then it was only because of silly knee-jerk laws designed to punish the innocent and encourage the guilty.

At various times, I have used a pocketknife to prepare and eat breakfast, lunch and supper; skin game; clean fish; open stacks of newspapers, trim shingles, cut lines of all kinds, ranging from threads on a suit coat to a rope on a riverbarge; trim gaskets for a malfunctioning carburetor in the rain, at night; sharpen pencils (it is harder than it seems to do that right); perform minor first aid (don’t ask); and a myriad of other tasks.

I have also used a pocketknife in the commission of some things that would have gotten my knife taken away from me by an angry mother or father. At one time or another, I’ve used a pocketknife as a screwdriver, prying tool, initial-carving device, paint scraper, can opener, wirecutter, and once upon a time or two, almost, as a weapon (but that’s a column for another day).

Any one of those acts when I was still on pocketknife probation would have earned me the loss of the knife and a hiding on the backside. You see, being allowed to tote a knife meant you were adjudged to have reached a certain level of maturity. It meant your parents felt they could trust you with a dangerous, even deadly weapon, and they could count on you to behave in a responsible manner.

With that trust came a responsibility, too. You keep your knife clean, sharp and well-oiled. You never cut toward yourself (I still have a scar to show why). You always keep control of the sharp edge when handing the knife to someone, and you wait until they said “Thank You” as a signal that they had a good grip. You never throw a knife, unless it is meant to be a throwing knife (and naturally, every one of us figured we could defeat physics and turn our pocketknives into throwing knives at least once).

Melodramatic as it may sound, a handy pocketknife has saved my life at least twice that I can remember, but both those adventures are also columns for another day.

Before all that, though, there was the pride and confidence of being grown up enough to deserve my first pocketknife. I still want to sneeze in memory of Miss Mamie’s dusty old store, a building filled with the smells of crumbling cardboard, a thousand kinds of fertilizers and pesticides and paint, and plain old dirt.

Papa and I had to buy a whetstone somewhere else – yes, Miss Mamie promised to have some next week – and after we got home, he carefully spread out a newspaper and demonstrated how to apply a little bit of oil to the stone before sweeping the blade just so against the stone.

His own knives needed to be replaced every 10 years or so, because he often wore the blade down to the point it would no longer stay inside the bolsters, causing small holes in his pants pockets that Mother grumblingly fixed. One year she even bought him a new knife at Christmas so he wouldn’t tear his trousers up anymore (and yes, Mother had her own pocketknife, just like her mother did, a small, slender blade that she carried in her pocketbook or sewing bag).

I thought about all those things as the young man tried not to embarrass himself by bowing up with pride the other day. I was proud for him; even though he can’t take his pocketknife to school (whereas the boys in my high school were once chided for not carrying a pocketknife to school) he has still reached a milestone.

I hope his father teaches him the proper way to oil and sharpen the blade, and that his mother sternly lectures him on not abusing that sacred trust with bone handles and carbon steel. I hope his friends are properly envious, and he is properly cautious when clipping a fishing line, whittling a stick, or skinning a rabbit. Shoot, maybe he’ll even learn how to sharpen a pencil.

When I was that young man’s age, every day held the potential for a new adventure.

And it would be unthinkable to go on any adventure without making sure you had your pocketknife.

Weaver is a staff writer with The News Reporter. He may be reached at 642-4104, ext. 227.