Pink Moons, Old Tools, And Legacy

My dad collected antique tools.

He had a lot of interests (I get it honest), but in his later years his primary focus was on old tools. He loved to educate people about them. Case in point, the picture above was him set up at a Farm Day event where he showed school kids all about a huge variety of tools. He got a huge amount of joy from it, and back at the family farm, he spent his free time researching tools, taking trips to get more tools, or building spaces to hold/use said tools.

When I think about my dad, his legacy now is as a good man. A sometimes prickly, often opinionated, but exceptionally good man who would do anything for you. And I like to think he's pretty happy with that. But, if there is an afterlife (most days I think there is), I know he's got to feel at least a little twinge of anguish over the fate of what he had spent decades accumulating. He passed so quickly that there was no time to make any plans for what to do with it all, and now it is scattered to the four winds. Most of his grandkids will have no memory of them really. My siblings and I will be the last ones alive to really remember them in intimate detail I imagine, unless something really dramatic happens.

And...that sucks. To be clear, I don't have a passion for old tools, but I can respect a passion of any type pretty much. And as I get older, I think a lot about the legacy I want to leave behind.

What's most important is that my loved ones remember me as a good person. That's the best legacy I can leave I think, and the only one that really matters. But I would be lying if that was the only legacy I want to leave.

I want my books to be that other legacy. I worry that I will be the faintest of blips, read by a few thousand people while I am alive, then not remembered anymore. Am I writing Great American Classics? No, of course not. But I want to write books that people enjoy, and pass on to their friends. To pass on to their kids. That then go on to recommend to their friends.

When you look at the bigger names in the space, Jim Butcher, Faith Hunter, etc, I know with a certainty that a few generations on folks will still be reading their books. And that's what I want. I'll be dead by then of course, so it's not about the money (it never has been, or I would have long ago picked a more lucrative hobby haha). It's about being remembered.

I spend a lot of time thinking about men like Nick Drake and Elliot Smith. Pink Moon is one of the most beautiful songs ever made. It came out a couple of years before Drake's death in 1974, to little fanfare unfortunately. But fifty years later I discovered it based on some recommendations from others. And it left enough of an impression on me that I looked into the life of Nick, with all its sadness. And I was pleased to see that the fame that eluded him in life did eventually come.

That's what I want. Fifty years on from my death, that folks are still enjoying my works.

I'm ok with being forgotten eventually.

I just hope that by the time I die that I've made enough of an impression that it doesn't happen the moment I'm not there to market me anymore.