Collecting the Ballast for Life's Storms
By Daniel Mack. The New York Times (August 29, 1996).
As a furniture maker, I need a huge supply of hardware: nails, screws, bolts of varying lengths and diameters and in a selection of colors, finishes and metals.
To me, my needs seem logical. It's my business. I am an artist making unusual furniture. I have always used this fact as my ticket to yard sales and the justification to stop at hardware stores in exotic locations, where I might find specialized items not found in my local stores. This has resulted over the years in what I recognize as the Uncle Art Phenomenon.
My Uncle Art, actually my great-uncle, had lost an eye as a result of a childhood accident in 1905. So as a child, every time I picked up a knife, Uncle Art's name came to someone's lips: "Careful! You might poke your eye out like Uncle Art."
He also smoked cigars - pleasant, aromatic, dreamy cigars. He was always good for a cigar box or two on my monthly visits during the late 1950's. I mention the 50's because it was the time of still-great cigar boxes. The hinges were pinned, the lithography was rich, and the art provocative: a sloe-eyed woman staring out at you from the inside of the lid. This was the boy's secret dream: "I wonder where she lives or if she has a daughter my age." Short of a rendezvous, you could collect the boxes. Inside those boxes went the software of a boy's life: baseball cards, airplane cards, stamps soaked off envelopes.
But Uncle Art kept hardware in his boxes: latches, brackets, hoods and eyes, braces, springs, cotter pins, picture hooks, nails and screws of all kinds. His basement workshop was a shrine to preparedness. He was the high priest, and I was the acolyte. For every box he gave me, I got that much closer to full initiation.
I never did take up cigars, and I still see with two eyes, but I now have my own reliquary for hardware. I have not just purchased hardware, I have collected hardware.
The telltale signs of a collector can be detected in a statement similar to this: "Aah, I have to go to the hardware store for something. I'll be back in 20 minutes. Do you need anything?"
Textual interpretation:
- Aah:
- Some genetic urge is happening.
- I have to go to the hardware store:
- Duty, in the service of a project.
- For something:
- The Grail, the Golden Fleece. I'll know what I need when I get it.
- I'll be back in 20 minutes:
- My mission will take me through the indeterminate future.
- Do y'need anything?:
- If you're hemorrhaging I could stop off for a Band-Aid. Anyway, I have to go now.
After years of hardware store expeditions with variations on this preamble, I have a pretty mean collection and a growing understanding of the relationship between hardware and personality.
First, the sheer weight and mass of your hardware collection are important because they provide a ballast to give you stability in the face of life's storms. Secondly, hardware offers the opportunity for some caretaking. As with any collection, the sorting and labeling are endless and pleasurable, of course. And like cigars, hardware needs the right humidity; otherwise, it dries out, warps or rusts. Finally, hardware is like doll-house furniture: the fuel of imagination.
You are the curator of the history of this hardware. You look at a box and say to yourself, "I know just where that came from." And after you go, that knowledge disappears forever. So when you buy someone else's hardware, you are buying a mystery.
Actually, I don't think my Uncle Art was very handy. Maybe it was his Sebastion Cabot physique. I could never picture him on a ladder or under a sink. But his collection of hardware was impressive and ancient. I guess he kept it as much for show as for repair. I assume he knew about the power of just owning old hardware.
On the other hand, my father, the mechanical engineer, had a supply of hardware that was lean and new. He bought just what he needed for projects and just what he could store in existing space. When I cleaned out his workshop after he died, I found very little I couldn't buy at a hardware store. In fact, much was still in the plastic bags it was sold in. My father didn't seem to need boxes of mismatched screws and corroded washers. And he had very few containers drafted into service from some previous lives: no coffee cans, baby-food jars, and certainly no cigar boxes with dark-haired women.
And there was no aromatic history. The miscellaneous small items of hardware I buy at yard sales have aromas. I don't know what the smells are, so I attribute them to History itself. These heady odors fuse me- or so I think - with the workers of the past.
They are like the smells pennies have. Of course, pennies also have histories. They've traveled all over the country, jangled in deep pockets and change purses, coursed through gum-ball machines, lurked under sofa cushions and in piggy banks.
The old screws, hooks and nuts are the coin of my realm. The realm is that world where people feel compelled to make something. I have seen women's sewing boxes and button collections that have similarly evocative powers and smells. So it's not just a "man thing," but something about all people who must make things.
But as I near age 50, I detect a shift. While I still need to acquire things, I'm also getting pleasure from sending things along. At my own yard sale a few weeks ago, I bravely put out a box labeled BROKEN HAMMERS AND HATCHET HEADS. I knew someone would be by to buy not just one, but all. Sure enough, it happened. But to my surprise, the man was 82, and I had to carry the 30 pounds of rusted treasure to the trunk of his car. He talked and visited, and his wife came over to us to see what he had bought. We all shook hands, and they drove off. At my next sale, I'll put out about a dozen items in a box labeled DRAWKNIVES, or a few dozen in one called DOORKNOBS or WORKING PADLOCKS. It's time to move them along the River of Stuff.
Not long ago, I needed a particular screw to finish off a chair. I certainly found the screw..and hundreds more. I realized, with a small gasp, that I will never be able to use up all the screws I own on all the projects I can do. I have passed the Dew Point of Screws. More screws have condensed in my life than I can use. It says something about the numbers of screws in the world, but it says more about me. I'm ready to start to put boxes of aromatic screws and shutter hinges and hardened faucet washers into yard sales, ready to feed somebody else with the undefined power of possibly useful common objects that will never be used up.
Uncle Art would approve.