I had been collecting fingernails ever since my father told me that fingernails and rhino horns were made of the same material. I automatically assumed that meant ivory, but just recently I discovered that fingernails were actually made from the same material as my hair. Well, I'm not going to assume this time that my hair is made from ivory. I already have this dirty old mason jar filled with my fignernail clippings, and now I have no idea what to do with it. I put it back in my desk drawer for now. I'll decide later. ** Thirty years later we are cleaning out my parents house. My father recently passed away. My mother passed away a month before him and he just couldn't hold on to life without her. At least he passed naturally. My old room is still there. Not much different than how I left it, although my mother had filled it with books and crafts. My desk still sits in the corner, and I open the drawer and find my fingernail clippings. A tingling shoots up my spine and sends a small tear to the very corner of my right eye. My father and all his silly facts are all there again, right in that jar of clippings. Here I am, a grown man, crying over a jar of fingernail clippings. My wife sees me sitting on my old bed crying holding the jar. She probably thinks I am completely nuts, but somehow she understands. All she says is "It'll be okay," and she sits down beside me. We talk about him for a while, about how he used to be an excellent woodworker, about the fiddle he made and his attempts to play it, and all his silly facts that I later found out were all fabricated. Later that night we are back at home. I brought home only two things, his fiddle and the jar of fingernail clippings. I knew now what I would do with that jar. I never was a very good woodworker, but I could play his fiddle, and that always meant a lot to him. How he loved to hear me play the Wildwood Flower. I took that jar of clippings down to the basement and ground them all into dust. I then mixed the dust with a polyester resin and let it harden into a small round disk. The next day I set to carving the material. It took me a year and several different attempts to get it right, but luckily I had plenty of fingernail dust on hand. Eventually I had a small carving of the Wildwood Flower, from which I set on to the part that scared me. I proceeded to inlay it into the face of his fiddle. I had watched him inlay hundreds of things before, so I knew how to do it, but it just scared me cutting into that finish. I remember watching him work on that fiddle. He never was completely satisfied with it. As I worked on carving the fiddle I felt his hand guide mine. He was there in the workshop with me, helping me along. It only took three hours to finish the inlay, but it looked absolutely beautiful when I was finished. I stood there in the shop and played the Wildwood Flower. It somehow sounded to be the most eloquent song I had ever played. When I finished the song I caught a glimpse of my father and mother standing in the doorway of the shop. My mother was crying with happiness and my father was standing there giving his usual approving smile.