Aug. 11, 2024

By Arthur H. Gunther III

thecolumnrule.com

Maybe the world seems so screwed up because too few of us have a box of old screws. Nails too. Or because we don’t visit them often enough.

Back in pre-credit card days, before we hopped in the car, hit ever-heavier traffic, circled the big-box store for a parking space, taking care not to be so close to another shopper that your car might be dinged, before we did all this to charge a pack of 20 screws when you only needed one; back in the olden days when instead you would visit the local hardware guy in town, or his competitor(s) and tell him you needed a certain screw.

He would go to a big bank of small wooden drawers and open one, pull out a cardboard box and give you a shiny screw. You would give him cash, probably change. You would exchange small talk, the sort in-town merchants and local repeat customers usually did. Human connection, understanding, affirmation.

My late father had several containers of screws and nails pulled from screen doors and other repairs that he made over the years in the various places where we lived. Added to the mix were screws, etc., from his father, his grandfather.

So, before he headed off to DeBaun’s hardware, or K&A or Scharf’s or Hadeler’s for a particular fastener, he would look at his collection, spilling the contents onto a table, which his sons would scoop up and put away – happy memory. Human connection.

Perhaps most families, individuals too, have screw/nail collections just like we once threw family garment buttons into tin containers, accumulated from generations. Family history.

Maybe if life slowed a bit that we would try to find that one screw in our old container, or if we jawed with the downtown hardware guy who gives us the right screw, maybe the world, pulsating evermore with war, poverty, greed, climate change, misdirected, incoherent politics, the challenges of social media and whatever, might not be, well, so screwed up.

The writer is a retired newspaperman.

My father’s screw/nail box.

-30-