The Metal Detector That Keeps Finding My Knee

My wife, Doris, says a retired man needs a hobby. She started saying it the week I alphabetized the spice cabinet for the third time.

“You moved the paprika,” she said.

“It was out of order.”

“Find a hobby,” she said. “Something outdoors. Something far outdoors.”

So I bought a metal detector.

I got it from a man in Merritt Falls who was selling it out of his carport, next to a rowing machine and a box of hubcaps. He told me it had found a Civil War button. I asked where the button was. He said he sold it. I paid him one hundred forty dollars anyway. I should have asked more questions. I usually should.

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Doris made a chart for the refrigerator. Three columns, in black marker. Bottle Caps. Pull Tabs. Treasure.

She drew the Treasure column narrower than the others. I noticed. I didn’t say anything.

I started in the backyard, which is where a man ought to start before he embarrasses himself in public. The machine beeped by the clothesline. I dug a hole the size of a pie plate and found an orange soda cap. Our son swore for three straight summers that he never drank orange soda. He’s fifty-one now. I’m saving it for Thanksgiving.

Bottle Caps: 1.

The second beep came while I was kneeling to fill the hole back in. It was loud. Very sure of itself. I swept the coil left and right. The beep followed me. I stood up. It stopped. I knelt down. It started.

Two years ago Dr. Pressley replaced my left knee. “Titanium,” he told me. “It’ll outlast you.”

He didn’t mention it would also tattle on me.

I have now spent one hundred forty dollars to locate my own leg. Doris says it’s the first thing I’ve found on this property without asking her where it was.

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By the end of the first week the chart read Bottle Caps: 23. Pull Tabs: 31. Treasure: 0.

Then, under the tomato bed, I found a spoon.

Not just any spoon. Doris’s mother’s silver spoon, the one with the little rose on the handle. It went missing the summer our son lost his first tooth. For better than forty years Doris has believed I threw it out with the corn husks. She has brought it up at two anniversaries, one funeral lunch and a Fourth of July.

The spoon was eighteen inches from the spot where Doris plants tomatoes every May. Doris is the only person in this family who plants tomatoes.

I washed it. I dried it. I set it on the kitchen table and said nothing. I have been married long enough to know the paprika rule applies to spoons.

Doris looked at it a long time.

“Well,” she said. “It’s tarnished.”

That is the closest thing to an apology I will receive in this life, and I took it.

Later I saw she’d written “Spoon” in the Treasure column. Then she crossed it out. Next to it, in smaller letters, she wrote, “That was always mine to find.”

Treasure: 0.

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Word gets around a small town. Pastor Lyle Benning called and asked if I’d bring the machine to the church ice cream social. Ardith Fenn had lost her car keys somewhere on the lawn.

I swept that lawn for forty minutes. I found three bottle caps, a bobby pin, a nickel from 1979 and, twice, my knee.

Ardith’s keys were in her purse. In the zipper pocket. She found them herself while I was showing the pastor how the machine beeps when I kneel.

She gave me a slice of peach pie for my trouble. I’d like it on the record that the pie was excellent. Doris says pie doesn’t go on the chart.

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Our grandson Tucker came for the weekend. He is seven. He believes the metal detector is the finest machine ever built, narrowly ahead of the backhoe.

We took it to Linden Park on Saturday morning. The grass was still wet and the ducks were not pleased to see us.

Tucker carried the shovel like it was a flag. Every beep was a major event. A bottle cap was “a real one.” A pull tab was “maybe from pirates.” Near the swings we found a little metal toy car with the paint worn off, and he held it up over his head like he’d won the county fair.

We also found a quarter from 1971. I let him have it. I told him it was older than his mother. He looked at it with new respect. He looked at me with less.

On the drive home he asked if the toy car could go in the Treasure column.

“Rules are rules,” I said. “Your grandmother runs a tight chart.”

He stared out the window like I’d called off Christmas.

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That afternoon I sat on the back steps with a glass of iced tea. My back was still sore from forty minutes on Ardith’s lawn. My good knee was jealous of my titanium one.

Tucker took the metal detector out into the yard by himself. He swept the clothesline. He swept the tomato bed. He swept the birdbath, and the dog, who allowed it.

Then he swept me.

The machine beeped. Loud. Very sure of itself.

“Grandpa! You’re beeping!”

“That’s my knee,” I said. “It’s titanium.”

“Is that like gold?”

I thought about it. “For a knee, it’s better than gold.”

He stood there a minute with the coil hovering over my leg, thinking hard. Then he set the machine down very carefully in the grass and ran into the house.

I heard a kitchen chair scrape across the floor. I heard Doris say, “What are you doing up there?” I heard a marker cap pop off.

When I came in for supper, there was a new line on the refrigerator. It was crooked and it went halfway into Pull Tabs, but it was there.

Treasure: 1.

Doris looked at it for a long time, the way she’d looked at the spoon.

She hasn’t crossed it out. It’s been three weeks. I check every morning.