A Father's Day true confession

I don't much care for hardware stores.

There! I've said it and already I can feel relief coursing through my veins.

Oh, I can appreciate the old-fashioned hardware store, wood floors, wood shelves, a loft maybe, and wood ladders that could take you from open bin to open bin of every sort of fastener ever made. I can appreciate it because it's old fashioned... and so am I. But the "big box" hardware stores of today with associates in matching aprons and hard shell plastic on everything and gaudy displays of power tools? It does nothing for me.

I don't care about power saws. Or drills.

Some might attribute this to a traumatic incident from my childhood: Back in junior high I was forced to take a shop class, very much against my will.

Yes, even in the late 60s the boys took shop and the girls took home ec. Yes, in the public school. (What private school -- other than a private trade school -- would waste money on shop equipment or multiple kitchens when the goal is to teach reading, writing and arithmetic?)

But I was not traumatized by this at all. Nor do I claim any loss at being denied the opportunity to burn cake mixes beyond recognition. I have several times since proved that I am just as inept in a kitchen as in a wood shop.

No, if anyone was traumatized by my brief and inglorious career in shop class it was the poor instructor: "My disaster," he called me, before going home at night to calculate whether he'd accumulated enough pension credits to retire immediately.

Apparently he hadn't.

Anyway, we both stuck out the semester.

All the kids were required to build something as a final project. Some of the showoffs undoubtedly made scale replicas of the Lunar Lander. I really wasn't paying attention to them; I was busy working on my bookshelf.

The bookshelf project was the result of extensive consultation between me and the shop instructor. He was entirely convinced that I would lose several fingers and perhaps a limb, but some sort of project was required.

My suggestion that I make a paperweight was perhaps appreciated more than I realized at the time... but still rejected.

So I made a bookshelf. A rather trapezoidal bookshelf, as it turned out. An attempt was made to screw in the shelves, but the plan was abandoned as the semester flew by. Also, I was far less likely to put out anyone's eye with a hammer and nail as opposed to a power drill.

When the project was finished, the instructor was thrilled. Neither of us lost any limbs or other body parts in the course of making that bookshelf. And I actually used it, at home, for a number of years. With books, no less.

And, though I've gotten older, and I can't possibly be as uncoordinated as I was back in junior high, I still don't like hardware stores. But I still like books.