Friday, September 22, 2006

The Last Customer

I’m standing next to the towering racks of lumber in the rear of the home improvement store.  It’s eight minutes to closing and I’m supposed to be over in hardware getting a curtain rod for my daughter’s ever-changing bedroom.  But instead, I’m still back in building supplies, thinking about the beginning of the world.

It’s good back here.  When I walk through those sliding doors, breathe in the yellow pine and hear the sparrows twittering overhead, I just relax.  Passing by the stacked 2x10s and dusty bags of concrete, I feel like God must have felt in the hours before creation.  In the Beginning, a formless void.  And the spirit of craftsmen hovered over the waters.

I gaze at the loaded pallets around me and consider the possibilities.  Man, I could build anything with this stuff.  Brick, mortar, lumber, windows, doors, drywall, conduit, shingles and paint.  And the tools?  My God, more Eastwing hammers and carbide saw blades than you could wear out in a lifetime.  There’s something alive in these materials you can almost sense as you draw near, anticipation maybe.  Pick me, pick me.  But you gotta select carefully.  Like treated lumber, which can go crazy on you as it cures in the sun, twisting a straight and true fenceline into a drunken mess.

A real craftsman in the act of creation is a thing to behold.  Rhythmic, graceful, wasting no material, energy or time.  Once I held a ponderous 4x8 foot sheet of plywood chest high against a wall, trying to support and nail it at the same time.  A carpenter walked over, reached into his belt and held up a 16D common nail.  “This,” he said, “replaces you.” He punched the 3-inch nail halfway into the stud with two clean hammer strikes, hoisted the sheet up onto the nail’s end and walked off.  Men may not be able to bear children, but many can create new life: visioning a thing from all the angles, selecting the materials, bringing it into existence and seeing that it is good.  The smooth glide of a well-hung door; the simple beauty of a Shaker end table, a flooded home or a fallen Trade Center born anew.

The store lights blink off as I head up to the checkout.  Don, the guy behind the counter, winks at me like an uncle over the heads of the customers.  He’s a big ex-contractor with solid forearms you don’t get from working your mouth all day.  Injured his back on the job some years ago.  I slide the curtain rod onto the counter, a little ashamed.  It’s thin stamped metal, will probably break, made overseas.  “That it?” he frowns.  “Yeah,” I shrug, “Don’t get my allowance till next week.” He smiles at the joke, but there’s a sadness tonight.  His ex has finally moved the kids to Florida, and his worker’s comp claim is still hung up with the lawyers.

As he rings me up I watch his big hands struggle to work the little plastic keys.  Like scarred work gloves packed with gravel, those hands were designed to move earth one shovel at a time, lay stone or weld pipe.  Not swipe credit cards in a Grape Road store.

I wonder what he and I would be doing, in more ancient times.  He might be wearing a ploughman’s leads or a soldier’s armor over those broad shoulders.  But he sure wouldn’t be dressed in a red polyester vest with a laminated nametag.  Just twenty years ago he and I would be standing in a cornfield here.

I hit the “OK” on the worn debit card screen and Don hands me my receipt.  I’m the last customer.  He stands there awkwardly behind his modern sentry post.

“Hey, ah, good luck.” he says with a single nod, a bow almost.

“Yeah, you too,” I say, “Good luck.”

And you know, we’re not talking about the curtain rod, or the drive home.

Broadcast by Jeff Nixa on September 22, 2006
Commerce • Customs & Rituals • Home & Garden • Permalink • Printer Friendly
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