Yesterday, hidden behind two circular-saw cases on a deep shelf under my workbench, I found my father’s bench plane, the tool he used for smoothing and straightening wood. It was in sorry shape. The blade was gouged, the wooden handle hopelessly loose, and, worst of all, the metal body of the plane was cracked. Though it was beyond repair, I briefly entertained the idea of sharpening it anyway. Marcel Proust famously wrote about how the taste of a madeleine soaked in lime blossom triggered childhood memories of his aunt’s room, which “rose up like a stage set.” Well, holding my father’s broken bench plane suddenly brought back his basement workshop. Dad had power tools of every kind: a band saw, a table saw, a lathe, a drill press. It was a woodworker’s shop, and it smelled of old dogs and aged sawdust. On metal shelves next to his workbench Dad kept all kinds of wires, shims, hooks, and screws in brown cigar boxes, and behind a box of large nuts and bolts he hid his booze. He would often disappear down there, a sober man with a job to do, and come back drunk, leaving behind unfinished projects in his crooked wake.