Question about Timeline

Hello all!
I've gained an interest in Timeline and I'm currently doing practice scenes to get the hang of it. The current scene I'm working on has the character pick up and object from the ground. My question is how exactly would I accomplish this? How would I have the character parent the object once he's reached down and touched it?

 

I have done it two ways - one using a single object and having a script to control the position of the object at runtime based on the selected "parent" (there are probably Animation Rigging constraints now for that). It worked, but what I do now instead is have two objects - one is the child of the hand, the other is on the table etc. I then use an activation track to activate one or the other so one actually disappears and the other appears at exact the same time. It worked for my use case and was less messing around.