Gift giving
Hardware stores are among my favorite places.
Like many middle-aged men, I have an inherent fondness for wandering up and down the aisles of hardware stores imagining all the cool projects I could accomplish if I just had the right tool. Let’s ignore that in many of the cases, I lack the time or inherent ability to do these projects.
I am simply dealing with the possibility of said hypothetical projects being accomplished at some point, if I only had the proper tool to get the job done.
As Benjamin Franklin wrote in Poor Richard’s Almanac, “For want of a nail the shoe was lost,” leading up a causal chain to an army being lost because of a shoeless horse.
When I try to use this logic on my wife to justify why I need more power tools, she just gives me a look. It is the sort of look that anyone who has been able to stay married to the same person for more than 25 years knows to mean that while you could theoretically win the argument, it would not be in your long term best interests to do so.
I read somewhere that good strategy is not finding a path to victory, but ensuring that all paths lead to victory. As with anything, a key part of this is defining what winning means.
Having the most well-equipped workshop with the shiniest tool in there, are worth in my mind, the fact that I would likely be sleeping on the workbench rather than in any room my wife happened to occupy.
Marriage is all about making compromises. I point out really cool, wild impractical, but nonetheless awesome tools, and she compromises by not objecting to me adding to my collection of screw bits and electronic odds and ends.
As with many people with a shared bank account, we have established limits where we at least have to have a conversation before making a major purchase. This is one of the reasons why the really cool and slightly used electric blu golf cart/people mover I want will likely remain at the campground in Indiana where it lives until someone else buys it. Even I recognize that there are higher priorities than being able to cruise around the golf course in style. If you need a list of those priorities, you can ask my wife and she will be more than happy to enumerate them for you.
All of this is beside the point that I love going to hardware stores. If for no other reason than there being a serendipitous quality about them. Where else can you go in picking up a box of 10 penny nails and leave with a chainsaw or even a maple syrup evaporator. Heck, I remember being at the hardware store at the Medford Cooperative years ago and admiring what I assumed was an exceptionally well made faux fur hat only to look at the price tag and label and realize that there was nothing faux about the mink is was made from. While it would have made for an epic addition to my wardrobe that I would have had to wear every day of the year in order to justify, I made the fiscally responsible choice and put it carefully back on the rack where it had been located.
This time of year is especially fun to go to hardware stores because in addition to the normal level of awesomeness of the tools and supplies, they are a level of weirdness in what other things you might find would make for incredible gifts and stocking stuffers.
This is not to say there aren’t always neat things. I have been eyeing up the salt gun to swat flys for some time and the novelty lighters make me wish I had more need of setting things on fire.
At Christmas time however, the people who are in charge of inventory at hardware stores always seem to slip in some things that are really special that you would never think to search out on your own or even be able to find if you actually looked for them. And besides, if you are there for the purposes of buying gifts for other people, and a shiny new tool happens to make its way into your shopping cart, then it is a win for everyone.
Brian Wilson is News Editor at The Star News. Contact Brian at BrianWilson@centralwinews.com.
