Navy Shirt, Coffee, and Five Minutes

Maya Ellison pictures Robert “Bob” Ellison in his navy shirt, ready to fix something, with a warm grin and a cup of coffee on the porch. That is the image that comes first. The shirt belonged to work that was practical. He did woodshop projects and cars at Lincoln High, then bigger building systems and boilers when he moved into community-college facilities. Maya’s memory of him is not a speech about those jobs. It is the man already dressed to take something apart and put it right, coffee nearby, grin in place. He loved retelling Maya’s science-fair volcano that actually worked and stained the garage floor pink for a decade. When he first saw the pink garage floor, he laughed and said that a project that works is worth a little paint. Then he kept the pink stain as proof that the experiment had succeeded. The stain stayed. The story stayed with it. He also joked about Jake’s first camping trip, when raccoons stole the hot dogs instead of the flashlight. Those were the stories he liked to retell: a volcano that worked, a camping trip that did not go as planned, and the proof left on the floor. Around the house, other small projects carried stories of the same kind. He wrote terrible limericks in a pocket notebook, including one about a leaky faucet that Maya framed for Christmas. He was mortified, which made the story even better. The notebook is still tucked in a desk drawer. Most of the pages are awful, but the family keeps it because it sounds exactly like him. Maya does not remember the exact rhyme of the leaky-faucet limerick. The part that felt most like him was the joke underneath it: whenever something dripped, he would calmly reach for a wrench and say, “Give me five minutes.” That line became a family signal. “Give me five minutes” meant Dad would take care of the little repair, even if it really took an hour. Helen uses it when the porch light or a cabinet hinge needs attention, and Maya says it before taking on a home project. It still makes everyone laugh because Dad was never actually done in five minutes. What Bob meant to Maya, in her terms, is that picture and those habits: the navy shirt and the porch coffee, the practical fixes at school and later at the college, the volcano he was proud enough to leave pink, the notebook of terrible limericks, and the calm reach for a wrench. The family still keeps the notebook because it sounds exactly like him. They still use his phrase, and they still laugh because five minutes was never five minutes. His legacy, as Maya described it, is not a list of titles. It is the stain kept as proof that the experiment had succeeded, the framed limerick that mortified him, the drawer with the notebook, and a sentence the household still says when something small needs fixing. A project that works is worth a little paint. Give me five minutes.