This past week, toward the tail end of a backyard shed refurbishment project that had gotten a little out of hand, I found myself urgently in need of a simple box of nails. They had to be two inches long, a size I was freshly out of because I had used the last ones in the existing box to begin the process of putting up trim around the doors and windows. Does a backyard shed need trim on the inside? Well yes, sometimes.
Anyway, this need, or perhaps it was more of a thneed, as Dr. Seuss would have put it in The Lorax, entailed one of my favorite kinds of in-town errands, namely a run to the hardware store.
It’s important to note that my use here of the word run does not carry the same meaning it usually has in Flagstaff, namely of a vigorous form of exercise carried out on two legs; rather, it conveys the meaning that for me began back in the Chicago suburbs, where it was always understood that a “run to the store” was to be taken in a car, and always involved a need for last-minute supplies. For my dad, who was an unabashed fan of large-scale renovation projects either in our old house or in its yard, such a run usually meant a trip to our local hardware shop. I am dating myself here, for the Ace store I have in memory long ago became one of the casualties of a tsunami of ice-cream parlors and designer clothing shops that washed into our suburb’s downtown, leaving a wrack of Lowe’s and Home Depots and other big-box stores dotted along the highways farther out.
HomCo is bigger than that old Ace, but it shares some of the same features, including a much better ambiance than Home Depot, fresh-baked cookies, and an always-helpful Hardware Man (or, just as often, Woman) who is well trained to ask (and usually answer) “need help finding anything?” when customers walk in. To me, this is an exceedingly challenging question. On the one hand, there usually is a very specific product I need when I walk in, and it has happened—though this is increasingly rare—that I have no idea where in the store to look for it. On the other, in this instance I knew exactly where the nails are, so I didn’t need any navigational guidance. But on yet another hand—and here by my hand-waving you can see that things are getting complicated—the question really serves to underscore the central contradiction of my visit, which is that however important they were the nails were not the main point of my being there. And so yes, I did need help finding something, but as I didn’t know what it was proper guidance was hard to find. Like a spiritual seeker who has with great effort found the Zen master, but then has no idea what to ask, I am often better off just wandering.
It is true that I have at times consulted closely and sometimes effectively with a sales associate—usually in the actual hardware section, where they keep the screws and fasteners of a zillion different types, with complex taxonomies and vocabularies—to identify an item for which I have no name. Like: what do you call the thing that would grip onto the edge of a mirror and hold it not flush against a wall, but extended out an inch or two? A floating bracket? Does such a thing exist? I still have no idea, but one of the associates and I had a pretty engrossing session exploring both the real and virtual aisles trying to find a solution to that puzzle.
But the kind of seeking that is the real reason I visit is more solitary. It entails wandering the aisles simply to get a sense of potential. Here I have to pause for a moment, as we academics are required to do these days, to acknowledge that my particular form of consumer potential grows out of my positionality as a male homeowner of a certain age, and that if I were in a different body or demographic I might find it instead in shopping for hip-hop vinyl, or high-end basketball shoes, or kitchen encumbrances, or Home Shopping Channel paraphernalia, or any of a thousand other product types that our civilization has thrust upon us to both gratify desire and, more important, develop more of it. So on this particular day, after locating the nails, I found myself drawn to the Closets/Storage aisle, thinking I might spot something that would help me expand the parameters of my project, since better Storage was after all the purpose of my shed renovation. Maybe I could find a way to more effectively hang outdoor gear—among the main contents of the shed, and among the few other product categories that I actually enjoy shopping for—and maximize the efficient use of space.
And so it was that a simple run to the store to fetch an $8.99 box of nails became an almost-hundred dollar extravaganza, as I happened upon the hanger brackets display, this being the section of the store where the retailers use cleverly designed brackets to hang the merchandise, which consists of more or less the same sort of brackets that you can purchase. There was something so meta about this; it was so like inadvertently learning the secret sales executives’ handshake, or like hearing a sort of secret corporate confession that consumerism is ultimately entirely and only about consumerism, that it hit me in an obviously vulnerable place.
So I came home with a bagful of brackets that would allow me to organize the shed so it could resemble a miniature REI. What bliss! I felt a satisfaction similar to what I felt on July 4 after we hosted a backyard picnic with neighbors and found that we had cobbled together a mighty find meal on short notice.
Of course, the next morning I was hungry again, and already I’m getting the itchy feeling that there must be something else I need at HomCo. Won’t be long, I’m sure.
Photo caption: A helpful Hardware Man. Photo by the author.
