In search of a screw: the highs, the lows
Sometimes the simplest of household tasks can prove nearly impossible. For instance, I spent 90 minutes on a Saturday trying to find a screw. Can you imagine? It was for a kitchen-cabinet handle.
Capital Iron is a good place to find hardware. Nuts, bolts. Screws. The whole shebang. The problem is, there’s so much other stuff to buy.
Upon arrival, I got badly distracted by some plaid shirts on sale. With such a garment, one would resemble a true woodsman. Then I remembered: the screw!
In my pocket was the kitchencabinet handle. It was merely a matter of finding a screw to fit. But that proved no easy task. There must be like, a million screws in Capital Iron.
So I approached a clerk who was talking to someone about rope. “Excuse me, I’m looking for a screw,” I said.
“What?” said the clerk. He was a middle-aged guy. He had the distracted air of someone with more compelling matters on his mind, utterly unrelated to screws.
“Are you knowledgeable about screws? I need one,” I said.
The clerk found the screw quickly. It fit right into my handle.
My victory gait strolling down the aisle reflected the jaunty aspect of a man who’s successfully found a screw. Plus it cost only seven cents. I was tempted to buy a woodsman shirt to celebrate, but resisted the urge.
Sadly, when I got home, the cabinet screw, which had seemed like an absolute lock in Capital Iron, proved too short. Shoved through the cabinet door, it barely even reached the handle. Some miscalculation on my part.
“Screw doesn’t fit,” I told my wife. “Insufficient length.”
“Go to Lowe’s to get another. That’s just a five-minute drive,” she said.
“Well, I was thinking of taking the rest of the day off. This screw search is exhausting. I’ll get it next weekend.”
Then my wife showed me her job list. She rolled it out like it was the Magna Carta. There were about 30 items on it. “Well, all right,” I said. “I’ll just make myself a Negroni first. I can’t be rushing around all the time.”
A Negroni is a delicious Italian cocktail. The secret is Campari, providing a nice bitter finish. Once the Negroni was gone, I eased onto the couch to read The Evenings by Gerard Reve. It’s supposed to be a masterpiece, a Dutch Catcher in the Rye. But the book, translated to English, just seems plain weird to me, as the author writes mostly about eating fried onions on bread.
Just then, my wife walked by, fluttering her task list like the flag of the righteous. I leapt up from the couch, cabinet handle in one hand, too-short screw in the other.
The screw system at Lowe’s is vastly different from Capital Iron’s. All screws are in clear plastic packages. This allowed me to view their length and compare it to the too-short screw. But to fit them into my handle, I had to poke the screws through the plastic.
Such a small act of vandalism had to be done surreptitiously. I’d glance over my shoulder, then start madly jamming screws into my handle. If any people wearing Lowe’s shirts walked by, I’d pretend to examine a hammer.
This approach seemed to work. Then someone cleared their throat behind me, just as I’d gotten a screw partially inserted into my handle through the plastic package. “Can I help you sir?” said the clerk. “Oh, yes. Sorry, but I had to poke this screw through the plastic in order to ascertain its girth,” I said.
The clerk was a young guy. No nonsense. He looked at me in a non-comprehending way.
“It does fit into my handle through. Fits ‘handily’ in fact. Ha ha,” I said. “OK sir,” said the clerk. I shuffled off down the aisle. My gait differed from the celebratory walk through Capital Iron. To tell the truth, I felt like a bit of a hoodlum.
Well, the new screw fit — although I had to add a washer. I considered fixing myself a celebratory Boulevardier (similar to the Negroni, but with bourbon instead of gin). However, the sight of my wife doing our finances at the kitchen table changed my mind.
So instead, I took Ollie, our pug, for a walk. After all, it’s not healthy for dogs to be lying around all weekend. Next week: Are faux turtlenecks (a.k.a. “dickeys”) the new hipster accoutrement?