The Spare Parts Shelf

Ever since his wife passed three winters ago, Lloyd hadn’t really planned anything.

Days ran together out on the edge of Bowling Green, Kentucky, where he lived in the same small brick house he and Carol had bought in 1973. He’d been a mechanic for 42 years. The garage closed down in 2016. After that, time just sort of happened to him.

One Tuesday morning, while sorting through the cluttered garage, he knocked over an old coffee can full of bolts. It rolled beneath a dusty workbench. Getting down on one knee to retrieve it, Lloyd noticed something he hadn’t seen in years: a half-built model of a 1965 Mustang, long forgotten and still sitting in its box.

He sat back on his heels and thought, “Well, maybe I’ll finish this. Just to have something to do.”

That evening, he cleared off a shelf and wrote on a sticky note: “Mustang by July.” He stuck it to the wall above the model box. He didn’t tell anyone. It wasn’t about proving something. He just wanted to see if he could still follow through on something.

He started working on it for twenty minutes each day after supper.

By the time July rolled around, the Mustang was done—every decal placed with tweezers, the paint job smooth as glass. He added a second sticky note: “Model T by Thanksgiving.” Then another: “Build a shelf for models.” Then “Clean out the back garden.” Each one had a quiet little deadline.

His daughter, Jill, came by that fall and paused in the garage, looking at the neat row of tiny cars and the shelf above them lined with notes.

“You’ve been busy, Dad,” she said.

Lloyd just nodded, then smiled. “Feels good, having something to work toward.”

By the next spring, Jill had brought her son over on weekends to help build models. He’d never taken much interest before. But now, they had a shared project. They even started a little club with other retired men in town who were feeling the same drift.

It all started with a goal small enough to fit on a sticky note.