Construction Chronicles Part 8

Different town, different time...same station.

When you work a lot on your house - when your house is your obsession - you frequent hardware stores.

I confess that much of my business goes in the direction of Home Depot, Menards, and Lowes. I also frequent a nearby Ace Hardware, but for big stuff I go big store.

I live less than one mile from a small True Value Hardware. I've driven past it many, many times. It's on a busy corner, bordered by a very small used car dealership, a liquor store and a scary looking bar. Street parking only. Yesterday, I needed paint supplies. Little stuff, little store. I went to the True Value for the very first time.

I'm from a northern Michigan tourist town, a native. I'm way native. My family goes back in that town on both parents' sides to the mid 1800's. I lived in the town before it became the place to vacation in the summer. I'm rural at heart. I drove beaters almost all of my life there. I've seriously shopped for single and double wide trailers. I ate at restaurants where the waitresses called you "hon." I couldn't grocery shop without running into at least three people I knew.

As I stepped over the threshold of the True Value, I entered northern rural Michigan. The store was jam packed full of stuff, all kinds of stuff, so much stuff that the aisles had unpacked boxes of stuff to go on the shelves already full of stuff. Behind the cash register on shelves were clocks and gadgets and lures and tools and stuff all boxed up and dusty. I don't recall how deep the store went or how high the ceiling was or whether there were windows anywhere other than the front display window jam packed with stuff.

The cashier was probably the owner. He was a guy in his mid to late fifties with a vest, longish grey hair, very sensitively polite and personable. Probably a hippy who went into social work, burned out, and got into selling hammers to chill.

The defining entity was the hardware store groupees. Two guys, in front of the cash register, shootin' the sh*t, tellin' big stories, bein' mighty courteous and makin' way for the "young lady" waitin' to buy her paint rollers, that's a dear. One with a big hand carved maple walking stick bragging about how it was made, the other just nodding a "hell yeah" kind of nod, the owner grinning and feigning busyness as they cast their banter into the confined atmosphere of the store.

I had to ask.

"Do you take Mastercard?"

"Yes, we do," replied Hippy Owner man.

Whew. I felt silly when he took my card and actually scanned it through a card reader. But, why wouldn't he...it was a hardware store.

"That bar across the street - is that a restaurant/bar, or is it mainly a bar?"

Man with walking stick: "Bar." (grunts)

"My father-in-law wondered if it might be a good place to get a hamburger."

Stickless groupee: "Choo Choo's. They have the best hamburgers in town." Echoed affirmations: "Choo Choo's, Choo Choo's..."

"Great. I told him that too."

Hippy Owner man, as I walk out the door: "Tell him I said to get the Big Red Caboose."

Gotcha, big guy.