A Father’s Day Tribute: Duct Tape or Joint Cement Bucket?

June 16, 2017

Some Dads can fix a leaky sink and fashion space suits out of duct tape. Others cure acne and lube a car motor with Windex. My Dad, however, has 180 uses for the ever- so- glamorous joint cement bucket. I am not sure I realized it until recently when I found myself in need of some extremely large containers to mix flavored water for a party I was hosting. The first thing that came to mind was to hop in the car, go to Home Depot and buy a 5 gallon bucket with a lid and “ta-da” a cheap and easy way to mix and transport massive amounts of water for a large crowd that I decided to infuse with lemons and limes (that’s another neurotic blog post for different time). As I proudly carried in my 3 shiny new buckets the girls in the office asked, “What on earth made you think to buy those?” I looked at the buckets and half a beat later decided it was just genetics.

Let’s step back in time about 35 years. My Dad is in construction (hence my professional choice I suppose) and he drove a big yellow van (then a big white one and maybe a big blue one in there somewhere) and basically as my 4-year-old brain can remember the cheaper work trucks just had a driver’s seat. You get where this story is going, right? Guess what seat number 2 (and 3 and 4 and 5) are? It was genius, I suppose, flip those bad boys over and you have as many passengers as you need. I distinctly remember being a kid trying to stay up on my bucket in the van. The creativity does not stop there: He used them for seats on the job sites when I visited,

he used them as tool buckets and wash buckets and storage buckets. You could store shims in them, use them as step stools and trash cans. They were a free side effect of the joint cement he used at work, so he would clean them out and “voila,” a brand new bucket was had!

when I visited, he used them as tool buckets and wash buckets and storage buckets. You could store shims in them, use them as step stools and trash cans. They were a free side effect of the joint cement he used at work, so he would clean them out and “voila,” a brand new bucket was had!

Back to the present, I was sitting at a stoplight the other day thinking about my Dad. I realized many memories I have of him, some of the still shots in my head, revolve around this round white object that has so many uses. Somehow he was and still is not too far from a joint cement bucket at any given moment. So when I haul my flavored water to a party or plop all my uncut flowers in a big joint cement bucket of water before I cut and arrange them, or I organize my gardening tools in the garage in my (yes, you guessed it) joint cement buckets, I realize the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree and I have to say that makes me very happy.