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My father's father, Jacob, came to the United States from Prussia in the waning years of the 19th century. He died before I was born, so I did not know him. Never being wealthy and with seven sons, there is little that he left to any one of them. We are a family of slow generations, Jacob was 40 when my father was born. I was born when my father was 40, and my first child was born when I was 40. There is no plan here, it just happened (I did not know of this coincidence until after my son was born).

My father, William--who was always called "Bill", even by my brother and I--inherited little except Jacob's skill at the workbench, his father's immigration papers, and a number of hand tools. The papers tell us that Jacob had two talents to offer to America: he made barrels and he made cigars.

Bill was not a large man, and photographs from the 1930s show him as the handsomest of the brothers, looking very Italian. He taught himself the mandolin, though it was not until after I had studied piano and could teach him that he learned to read music. Our closest friends (practically second parents to me) were Italian, Milly and Jim Guttadura. My father delighted in Italian songs, which he sang with the three Italian barbers whose barber shop was next door to our general store. They were an authentic, unselfconscious barbershop quartet, and performed a cappella or accompanied themselves with a guitar and my father's mandolin. In good weather, and when business was slow, they practiced outdoors under the traditional striped barbershop pole, to the pleasure of the few people who walked up and down the street. Often a customer, theirs or ours, would ask the group to finish the song before serving them. Hurry was not as fashionable then. I would pull up a wooden chair, and the customer would sit and be seren aded before getting a haircut or shave, or coming into our store for a western omelet, a grilled-cheese sandwich, or cream-cheese-bacon-and-tomato on a roll.

My parents ran a true general store, stocked with a little of all that was needed, from clothing to toys to hardware, They had a small post office in back, which my mother, Frieda, ran until the town built a real post office at the far end of the block, next to the firehouse. A grill served up breakfast, and right up front was a glass-fronted candy cabinet to drag people in by their sweet tooth. My parents never hired any help, and ran it themselves except on rare occasions when Milly or one of Frieda's sisters would come in for a few hours. The life of a small-town store owner was not one that gave much leisure, yet my parents seldom appeared harried.

When I was old enough, I helped customers find items and later I repaired watches and did locksmithing, working at a small bench at the rear of the store where I made keys and opened locks whose keys had long been lost. I learned the skill from a set of tools and a book my father found. Repairing clocks and watches I figured out on my own. I was very proud when my father put up a sign in the window: Locksmithing and Watch Repair on Our Premises. That was me. A handful of times I was called to someone's house to open a locked door, and once I opened a small safe that was wheeled into our store. With those skills, I would have made a swell burgler, but crime was not in our family's lexicon.

After my parents were gone (I shall never cease to miss them) my brother Michael, whose wife is a marvelous and professional maker of fine furniture, got Jacob's collection of planes, built to shape wood in various and wonderful ways. These planes have bodies of wood, and steel blades that take a fine edge. My brother's wife uses them to this day, which is why they went to Michael. She says that when she is restoring antiques, she can sometimes use them to match a molding shape no longer available. A small awl, whose wooden handle unscrews to reveal a set of bits (some clearly hand-made), and two sharpening stones are all the tools that I have of Jacob's. The large stone is of medium grit, and was purchased in the late 1800s. I still use it for sharpening kitchen knives. My grandfather's sharpening stone, my father's steel for honing, I slice the dinner meat and serve it to our children: four generations in action at once. But it is the small stone that I treasure.

It is in a thick-walled wooden box that my grandfather made. His initials, a combined "J" and "R" in a serifed style, are carved into the top. The stone is white and hard, and of very fine grain. Unlike the large stone, it is only roughly shaped into a rectangular solid. The working face was, however, carefully trued, and is now slightly dished with use. When I asked my father why it was not a nice shape like the larger stone, he told me how his father had obtained it. I cannot remember his exact words, but it was something like this, "Your grandfather, Jacob, tried to find a hard, fine stone--like the one he had had in Europe, to edge his tools. A knife must be sharp to cut tobacco cleanly, a plane must be even sharper if it is to cut rather than pull the wood apart and leave a smooth finish. A leather strop, charged with emery or rouge, is the finishing touch, but the last stone must be very fine. Jacob wished that he had brought such a stone with him, but he did not realize that they would be hard to find  in New York City, and there is just so much a poor man can carry.

"One day your grandfather saw such a stone at another workman's shop, and learned that it came from a small town in upstate New York. Leaving before fall had hardened into severe winter, he got into his wagon and left to find the mountain village he'd been told of. He did not have maps, and the roads were mostly dirt and unmarked, but as he went he asked the way, and in a few days had found the site. The quarry had closed, he learned, and no stones were available. Not giving up, Jacob walked through the woods and up the mountain, where, by following half-overgrown trails, he found the old quarry. Slowly, working his way right and left, Jacob climbed the rock face, standing on the narrow ledges the workmen had left. After much searching he found the very kind of rock he sought, and managed to chisel and prise out a piece sufficient for his needs. When he got it home, he squared it up as best he could, and made the box for it. He used it for years before I was born, and I use it still."

My father told me of the hardships of Jacob's long ride home, sitting exposed on the buggy's seat through the rain and sleet of those late autumn days, now over a hundred years ago. It was the only time that my father saw Jacob leave his workbench during the day except for the Sabbath and the high holy days.

The box tells its own story. Bill learned at Jacob's side to saw wood into the thin pieces needed for cigar boxes and barrel staves. I was never able to match my father's dexterity and precision with a handsaw. There is no way that I could keep the flexible blade dead straight and its path precisely parallel to the last cut as he could. Every piece of wood Jacob and Bill used was hand-sawn.

The slightly arched top of the box has a linked J and R that Jacob carved.

My father first pointed out that carving to me when he noticed that I had come up with and was using the very same "JR" logotype that his father had used. Other than that single ornament, every line and part of the box is utilitarian. The hand-shaped sides of the case are thick and dark-stained with the ordinary motor oil my father and grandfather used for sharpening, a practice I still follow. The cleanly-tenoned joints have been made visible by shrinkage of the wood across the grain, but whatever glue my grandfather used still holds firmly. Four tiny brads were used to keep the parts in alignment while the glue dried. I know this because I can see the heads of the brads, and because my father taught me never to use nails alone in making furniture. "Use tiny nails that will not split the wood to hold the parts while the glue dries, and use clamps. Make the glue do the work," he said. His observation that nails and staples are a mark of cheap workmanship holds good today. When the drawer to my daughter's des k fell apart, my post-mortem revealed that it had been nailed together. There was no glue. I removed the nails, reshaped the joints until they met without gaps, and glued it together, using a few tiny nails and weights to hold it while the glue dried. I like to think that my grandfather would have been proud.

In my office the stone and its case sit on a bookshelf where they remind me daily of my grandfather's perseverance and practical perfectionism, where they can inspire me, and where I can sharpen my pocket knife when things get a little dull.