Mortals die, gods live forever
Tunnel Vision
From behind the hardwood counter I’m fixed with a Kodak stare. Immediately a cold buttery sweat of inconsequentiality develops, sliding from the nape of my neck down to the edge of my arse crack. I’m reliving a wishful lifetime of forgettable moments, the dreaded unshakable ick that comes with making a total balls of what should be another run-of-the-mill encounter.
Social miscues like unthinkably calling your teacher ‘Mam’ in front of your classmates, or when a you fire off an inadvertent ‘I love you’ to a confused bus driver instead of a ‘goodbye’.
The error could be more egregious still. Like remembering when I congratulated a larger lady I hadn’t seen in sometime on the impending birth of a child, or that time an overly friendly hotel concierge gave me his phone number and I didn’t have the heart to tell him I wasn’t so inclined. Days of clandestine skulking and strategic avoidance ensued.
Nothing can prepare you for that level of cringe, though this was starting to come close.
Standing in this [unnamed] hardware shop began another awkward dance without music.
I’m outside the parish so maybe I don’t have a full grasp of the lingo.
“Come again...,” says my denim clad oppressor, standing large with the quiet authority of a man who’d never dug a crooked ridge in his life.
His t-shirt, peering out from an open-chested shirt hints at some ironic printed cliché along the lines of working hard and hardly working. But because of the buttoning and this man’s girth only the words ‘Hard’ and a fettled distance lower ‘on’ can be made out.
I’m full sure this person, a great pot walloper of a man with upper arms like boiled hams marinated with a bear-like musk of Eau de Cuprinol and WD-40 For Men, was beginning to enjoy watching me squirm.
I tried to repeat what I’d earlier asked, less sure about what I’d said than before.
“I need a eh... two metre.. no four... wo... a big, eh... about this but bigger,” was my struggled explanation, arms flapping outstretched like a gull defending a fallen chip.
I often miss on measurements and it has become something of a life choice. Like lazily referring to everyday objects as a ‘thingy’. I might reach for a ‘yay big’ or ‘about that’ when speaking metrically, or a ‘length’ of whatever for good measure. I’ll always be a ‘few miles’ away, or ‘two minutes’ from home.
It invariably means I have all manner of scrap cluttering my wood shed.
As my old St Pat’s woodwork teacher drilled into me, until such time as a I lost interest: ‘Measure twice, cut once’.
By now, on the shop floor, a small queue is forming. My blushes shoot rosier.
The man’s understandable reply was a muttered “Huh?!”, his face scrunched to the look of someone trying to understand calculus taught by toddlers.
A mottled patch on the classic cod-grey painted counter catches my eye. The accumulated grime, through periodical transactions and a great deal of leaning, has manifested somehow into the likeness of Pope John Paul II wearing what appears, from my angle of vision at least, to be a party hat.
From within I begin to feel my brain shrinking. ‘So long sucker! We’ve had some good times, but you’re on your own now’. Footsteps peter off into the darkness.
My reason for being in this place and moment started out straightforward enough.
It’s a rare outing I do be in a hardware store. I’d be known to make a complete haims of most things. But when required I like to build myself up as I imagine one would for a Junior B relegation decider. Fists balled, chest out, a deepening of the voice. Two layers of shin pads.
I have it in my head that such places are enshrined with a presumed sense of machismo, an aura of Old Spice, weathered heads, and chapped hands. It works in descending order too- Woodies staff and the likes at the top, with their spotlessly clean floors and radio friendly DJs, all the way down to the more rough and ready establishments where the people who work there eat Croc wearing ne’er-do-wel hipsters such as myself for breakfast. No salt required. This place I was in is middle of the road. Dinner with gravy. No veg.
For much needed context, my garden is spread across three levels. This includes two fairly precarious slopes and so to get my lawnmower from the top garden down to the bottom requires an act of brutalist pragmatism, balance, and a dash of good luck.
What I mean by that is I hold onto the handle to roll it gently downwards until my arms give up, at which stage it’s in the lap of the Gods to decide as the mower trundles like a shopping cart down Cock Hill.
The successful reverse journey, unless my better half is available, is a similar feat of sheer ignorance.
It was during one recent uncultured attempt to ramp the godforsaken mower back up that it fell foul of gravity, and I in turn landed backwards through the rotting handrail I’d been using for leverage.
My polytunnel just so happens to be on the lower garden deck, and I’ve become as prideful about how it looks on the inside as it does outside. So this modern day labour of Heracles, albeit hulking a mower and not the head of a hydra continues until such time as I can afford to either tarmac the lower tier or have an elevator installed. Neither seem practical, and in the interim what I needed here was a ‘D-rail’- two and a half metres of new handrail- and a ‘lock’ of new fencing posts for attaching it to.
Which is what I eventually got on my shopping trip, along with a healthy dose of friendly advice.
What I love about about places like this hardware store is they’re always a mine of information.
Since starting out in my gardening endeavours I have had reasonable and often cause to doff my proverbial cap respectfully many’s the time to those more knowledgable.
Just inside the door, beside the rakes and weedkiller, I outlined my dilemma to this man as he eventually pointed me in the direction I needed. I spilled the beans on the Krypton Factor trial of mowing my lawn over several years - two mowers already broken and a developing chiropractic conundrum besides. Causation versus correlation.
Unbeknownst to himself this man had become both counsellor and consoler.
“Why don’t you just buy a cheap mower and leave her at the bottom?” he suddenly asks. “Leave the heavy wan at the top.”
I’m taken aback. I struggle to correspond. So stupidly simple is his suggestion that it hits me with the force of using a spade on a soufflé.
From somewhere far beyond my brain legs it back into the room, echoes of inarticulate rage, trumpeting views of a world at odds with inconvenient fact. Of course he’s right and internally I’m kicking myself.
I was once told, probably during my school days too, that making the simple complicated is commonplace. Another old adage is that the only difference between a problem and a solution is finding the solution. And so to the man in the hardware shop, I doff my cap yet again. Not all heroes wear capes. A God among men.