I want Dad's lunch pail.

I imagine it on my desk, right next to my computer, holding all my pens, notebooks and stick-'em pads. A reminder of a promise made, and a promise kept.

So I pester him. "Have you found it yet?"

"I don't even know if I have it anymore," he told me. "I may have thrown it out when I left the plant."

Please, no.

My father does not understand why his lunch pail matters to me, probably because he never thought his job mattered, either.

For 36 years, my dad worked in maintenance for the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company. He was 20, already married and the father of two-month-old me when he walked through the doors of the power plant carrying a union card and a brand-new black metal lunch pail. He never replaced it. By the time he retired, there were holes on the bottom corners where metal nubs used to be.

That lunch pail is my most enduring childhood memory of life with Dad, who was big and burly and not much for small talk or late-night tucks into bed. Most evenings, it lay open on the kitchen counter until my mother filled the Thermos with milk and made four sandwiches wrapped in wax paper. Sometimes she drew a funny picture on his paper napkin, or scribbled a little note.

"I love you," she would write in her loopy backhand. "Meatloaf for dinner!"

When I was little, I didn't understand what Dad did for a living. His job was simply the thing that kept him away. He worked a lot of overtime, and even when he came home on time, he had little to say about his day. Little good, anyway.

"You could teach a monkey to do what I do," he said some evenings to no one in particular, staring straight ahead as he nursed his Stroh's. At 6-foot-1, 220 pounds, my father was a giant to me, and I could not bear to imagine him any other way. I would scurry off, unwilling to meet his gaze.

Once I started working for a living, I occasionally prodded my father to tell me about his work. I wanted the reality check, the reminder that no matter how hard I thought I was working, I would never come close to the hard labor he knew.

"What did you do there?" I would ask. "Tell me about the equipment you used. Who did you talk to all day long?"

He was never interested in the conversation. "It was a job," he'd say. "Not a career."

That's probably why he can't understand why I want his lunch pail, but he's promised to keep looking for it. To Dad, it is a reminder of the job he hated. To me, it is an enduring symbol of the promise he made to his four young children.

"You kids are never going to carry one of these to work," he'd tell us, over and over. "You kids are going to college."

He made good on his promise. I am the oldest, so I was the first to go. Whenever I came home for a weekend, my dad would take me with him to run errands and, inevitably, we'd end up at one of his favorite taverns. His buddies always said the same thing when we walked through the door. Here comes the college kid.

Dad would beam. "Yup, she's never going to carry a lunch pail, by God." A dozen glasses would rise in the air.

My story is as old as the bricks under Cleveland's earliest streets. I am the child of working-class parents determined they would be the last of their kind. And there was the same unspoken deal in thousands of households. We'll send you kids away, but don't you ever forget where you came from.

As if we could.

I went to college, and so the heaviest piece of equipment I have to lift is a laptop. I became a writer. That is what I do.

My home is now in a neighborhood where the railroad tracks groan under the weight of the commuter train, instead of the freight trains of my childhood. That is where I live.

But I am also the girl whose father carried a lunch pail for 36 years.

And that is who I am.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer and author of two books from Random House, "Life Happens" and " … And His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz ([email protected]), and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.