The cutting edge of memory.

In a small bowl pinched from red Clatsop clay, I keep my grandfather's knife. I used to carry it everywhere in my pants pocket. It's a two-bladed penknife, made in Germany. At the base of each blade, two little men are joined at their shoulders and knees in the trademark.

The knife is old. My grandfather died at ninety-four and lived almost half his life in the nineteenth century. In those days, a knife might still be kept to fashion the tip of a quill pen--so, a penknife.

The blades and back spring are grey, not silver. They lie snugged between shims of brass, next to the handles, the steel so good it takes a razor edge and holds it. The handles, set with nickel-silver pins between bolsters of the same metal, are real mother-of-pearl, pale and radiant. Closed, the knife lies just short of a palm's breadth, cool and glistening as a sardine.

The knife came to me when my mother was dying. In her last months, she sought to order her belongings. I'm not sure whether the knife was something I had seen before, but when it appeared in a handkerchief box holding small treasures from my grandfather's desks and pockets--other small knives, ornate mechanical pencils, ivory rules--I knew it was something I wanted. I put it in my pocket the moment my mother gave me the chance.

I carried it there for over a year, every day. When my mother died, it was in my pocket. When I scattered her ashes and wiped my hand on one of her father's silk handkerchiefs, it was there. But when I returned across the Cascades to finish my term at the local college, and parked my car in the snow and cinders below the building where I would take my final exam in differential calculus, I lost the knife. I didn't realize it until that night, but my pocket companion was gone.

Some people can lose objects and be unaffected. Lost things bother me. When something as close and beautiful as my grandfather's knife is lost, I go a little crazy. I can't get it out of my head. To me, lost means "not found" rather than gone. I searched under cushions in the house, under the seat of the car, in the parking lot, the classroom, the men's room, everywhere. I'd been. I made calls didn't sleep well, crabbed at my wife and kids, stalked and paced. Days slipped into weeks, then months. I put thoughts of the knife aside and returned my attention to school. Still, I missed the knife in biology lab; it had been sharper than any scalpel.

I am not a reader of bulletin boards, except to kill time. The spring after my mother died I was back in the math building, waiting for a class in integral calculus to begin, when I drifted to a bulletin board and a blue poster announcing an upcoming play. Slanted across the upper left corner was a handwritten message in blue ink, faint against the background. "Small pocket-knife found," it said, and gave a phone number in Prineville, a town in the next county, an hour away.

When I got home, I called. Yes, it had pearl handles. No, I couldn't remember the brand, but the trademark had two little men standing together. What did the little silver shield on one side have on it? My heart stopped. "Nothing," I said, "it's blank."

"Damn," said the man in Prineville, "I was hoping nobody would claim it. It's a beauty, and I've gotten used to it. I guess you'll be wanting it, though." I told him I'd be there in an hour. He worked in the assessor's office in the county courthouse, an old building of heavy stone and dark wood. I found him in a basement office, and he handed the knife across the counter, a little reluctantly. He had sharpened it differently, but it was my grandfather's knife, returned.

For a while, I remembered his name, even turned it over in my mind the way I turned the little knife in my hand. For perhaps a year I remembered it, but now I've forgotten. I was going to send him something, a bottle of good wine, but I never did.

When he found it in the snow and cinders below the math building, what thought pulled him to the bulletin board to pen his note? It was so small, furtive; he had not truly wanted to write it, yet was compelled. By what?

I don't carry the knife with me anymore, and seldom use it. I'm afraid of losing it again. Or maybe the loss felt by the man at the courthouse when he remembers giving up the knife keeps it in the clay bowl instead of in my pocket. I can see him get up from his desk as he waits for his coffee to cool, stare absently out the basement windows to the patches of snow lying around the courthouse steps, and remember the knife. I wonder if I could find him now, years later.

David K. Platt is a free-lance writer living in Corvallis, Oregon. He has formerly taught composition and technical writing at Oregon State University.