This appeared originally on January 15th at Great Minds Think Aloud.

I carry a knife around with me.

Folded up in my front left pants pocket is a black jackknife that I bought 5 months ago at the corner hardware store for $14.95. This particular bit of cutlery replaced a scared and tarnished nickel-plated pocketknife/multitool that I’d had for years. I finally gave up on the old contraption when the Phillips-head screwdriver blade wouldn’t stay folded and the tip endlessly jabbed me in the leg.

It’s an odd habit to carry around a potentially deadly weapon in these times.

Fortunately the ritual of slipping the jackknife into my pocket every morning has nothing to do with personal safety, it instead trails back to two other idiosyncrasies: I have a passion for tools, especially those that can be clutched in one hand, and I like to be prepared for any difficulty that might present itself.

The matter of tools has familial roots. I sometimes imagine that a Neanderthal version of myself probably pulled a razor sharp flint blade from under his bearskin grab to clean out the cave gunk from under his fingernails when he got bored. Certainly my more recent Spanish Californio, Canadian Woodsmen and New England Yankee ancestors carried around knives to help them deal with daily difficulties. A sharp steel edge can quickly produce several lengths of acceptable cord from a leather hide to lash together objects or perhaps be used to shave off the moldy parts from a block of goat cheese.

Nearly all of the adult male members of my sizable family share two qualities: pocketknives and mustaches.

At birthday celebrations or Christmas get-togethers when the little nieces and nephews struggle with the nearly impossible to open clear fortresses that protect Barbie dolls and Buzz Lightyears, an uncle or an older cousin sporting facial hair and a knife blade will free the inextricable plastic prisoners and save the day. Beaming munchkins are the reward for this benevolence.

On my twelfth birthday my father gave me my first pocketknife. Nicely wrapped in plain red paper (probably by my mother) was a velvet-lined paperboard box that contained a Boy Scout pocketknife with four shiny folding blades and a fake bone handle.

I entered the Scouts a few months earlier mainly to be allowed the privilege to carry around the tangible symbol of preparedness and imagined manhood. At my grade school in the late 1960’s only Boy Scouts were permitted to possess pocketknives. Dozens of smug Sixth Grade lads joined up and carried around these folded up weapons of minimal destruction. Never was one displayed in anger which, we had been profusely forewarned, would cause the Principal to confiscate the coveted object. Often they were used to tighten the hinge screws on a pair of glasses, adjust the inner workings of a finicky Bell & Howell movie projector or pry open an aluminum Snack Pack Pudding can when the metal pop-top had broken off.

I kept the pocketknife with me long after I’d left the Scouts, carried in my left pocket through Middle School, High School and into college. I used the screwdriver to adjust the ignition points on my first car. I sliced open stacks of cardboard shipping boxes at various jobs. I cleaned the gunk from under my fingernails when I got bored.

When it came to picking various visual elements for the cover of my science fiction novel The Ripple in Space-Time, there wasn’t much doubt that a knife of some sort should be part of the image. I settled on a dagger, an especially impressive one at that, as a symbol of the power and perceived menace presented by some of the important characters in the book.

Now as the book is going to press and I glance at the cover, I find myself grinning, I have a miniature folding version of the tool in my left front pants pocket.