Home Repair
Not long ago, a hinge broke on one of our kitchen cabinet doors. My thinking was: “I can fix that!” All I needed was a simple edge plate. It wouldn’t cost much, maybe a buck or two. I set off on my errand. It took longer than expected. Nobody had the part: not our local hardware store, not Home Depot, not Lowe’s, not even Walmart. Each time I showed the broken edge plate to a helpful hardware consultant, I got the same response: close scrutiny of the damaged item, followed by a look of perplexity, then the question: “Where did you get this thing, Europe?” I’ve never done any hardware shopping in Europe, but after being asked the same question over and over, I began to have my doubts. After a certain point, the Hudson River started looking like the Rhine and I was living in the Alps instead of the Catskills. Who knew that a simple home repair could land you in a foreign country?
I lost a whole summer day running around trying to find the part I needed. When I finally got home, I did what I should have done from the start: went online and in no time found the part. And it was in Florida, not Europe. I placed my order via the website HardToFindHardware dot something or another—and they shipped it that very day. I was home free! A couple days later, the edge plate arrived. Now to commence with my simple home repair. Darn! A new problem presented itself. I was missing a screw. With all the loose ones lying around my place, you’d think one of them would work. No luck. Back to the hardware store I went.
I presented my brand-new edge plate and explained that I needed a screw that would fit. The proprietor gave me a weary look, then proceeded down a dim-lit aisle to a large array of wooden drawers, hundreds of them, each filled with various kinds of screws, nuts, and bolts. He opened a drawer, poked around for a time, and closed it. He opened another drawer, poked around, and closed it. Many other drawers were opened, poked around in, and closed. Once again I felt myself slipping into a foreign country, this one called the past.
When I was young, I had a part-time job with an inventory service that counted cans in supermarkets. Well, not just cans but everything—cartons of milk, rolls of toilet paper, boxes of laundry detergent, bags of frozen vegetables—everything, that is, except for what was in the meat department. They had specialists for that. Over the eight or nine years I did that job, I must have set foot in every supermarket in the New York metropolitan area. And not just supermarkets, but Rite-Aids, liquor stores, Seven-Elevens, and even the old Two Guys discount stores. Every once in a while, we were sent out to inventory some sketchy industrial site—a perfume factory on Long Island or a dye warehouse in Jersey City—without any personal protective equipment. I didn’t go on that dye warehouse job, but my brother did. When he came home, I got to watch him cough up and spit out all the colors of the rainbow.
The worst job for me was a mom-and-pop hardware store somewhere in the Litchfield Hills of Connecticut. It was supposed to be a very small business, so the inventory company sent just two of us. From the outside, the place did look tiny: a rickety old wood frame building with a cigar store Indian standing on the porch. My coworker and I thought we’d be out of there before lunch. Then we walked in and saw that the entire back wall of the store was taken up by hundreds of those old-fashioned wooden drawers, each one filled with myriad screws, nuts, and bolts—each one needing to be counted. The nice old lady who owned the place smiled at us and said, “Better you than me.” We were screwed. I don’t remember how long we were in there, but it was well after dark when we finished.
That unwelcome memory kept me company as I watched the proprietor of our local hardware store poking through those drawers, until he handed me a screw. “This is it,” he said. I happily paid him the ten cents asked of me and hurried home, only to discover that the screw was the wrong size. Why hadn’t I checked it when I was in the store? Oh well, I can live with a broken cabinet door for a while longer. Sooner or later, though, the moment of reckoning will be at hand. I will return to the hardware store, once again to stand before the appalling array of drawers. Either that or move to Europe.
©John P. O’Grady
Originally appeared in The Mountain Eagle on August 14, 2020
