What accounts for my insecurity regarding the trappings of real men?

In another life I'd have spent my days hunched over a work bench making things spin and tick and whir. I'd have worn a blue work shirt the color of cornflowers, with my name embroidered over a pocket filled with little silver tools that grip and snip and measure invisible relationships that make things spin and tick and whir.[1]

Like a clock shop, or a fixit shop, when there were such things, when electrical gadgets didn't fail that often, and when they did you repaired them.

I like the life I happen to be slouching through, but I wouldn't mind trying that one on for size.

I had a chance recently to visit a local radio parts store in town; they service mostly commercial 2-way radios - police, cab dispatchers, that sort of thing. They hooked me up with a speaker mic and a BNC-SMA connector so I could run my Wouxun KG-UVD1P off the Tram antenna I blogged about here.

I waited a bit while a man helped someone on the phone. There were other employees in the shop, and I was the only customer, but the man on the phone said he'd help, so I waited. He came over quickly as soon as he hung up.

Ralph (not his real name)[2] was an old radio tech from the Army, and a licensed ham; he doesn't do much with the hobby, but spent quite a bit of time just talking with me at the counter about my Wouxun; he handled my radio and examined the ports and knobs with a delicate familiarity a concert violinist might accord a fiddle. Then he led me through the shop (which occupied a couple buildings and spanned an alley) and back to his workbench, a small table in a small room, but well-lit and stocked with radio parts and testing equipment.

I was home.

I tried to get him to talk about his work, but he was more interested in matching a mic to my Wouxun (which turns out to be Kenwood compatible), and that was fine by me, I wanted to get one there at a decent price rather than order one.

The shop is big, and Ralph's space very small. Age has added a bleak heaviness to him, in girth and grayness and a self-absorbed linguistic distance; yet he was agile and sharp, even fast, as he maneuvered around the shop and his office.

I suspect Ralph subsists modestly on his Army skills, and probably doesn't see the simple charm in it I do.

I understand that Army radio operators have a very short lifespan in battle, or at least they did in the wars fought in my childhood, because transmissions can be detected and targeted quickly.

Ralph is a survivor.

Now let me tell you a different story:

I used to work in a hardware store when I was about 14, Don Smith True Value Hardware in Erie, PA. It was an old building, an old store with old wood floors and old ways. Sold nails and grass seed by the pound, cut rope and hose and chain and just about anything else you needed by the foot. They used an old-fashioned till, the kind with the numbers that popped up in a glass window. (I learned to count change there; I don't think kids can count change anymore.) In the back they had a machine that cut and threaded galvanized pipe, and in the front a motorized paint mixing machine spattered with every color in the paint chip fan.

You're probably thinking I loved it there, that I was instilled with an appreciation of the simple, rustic hard-working life.

No.

One of the owners didn't like me and made no secret of it. He tested me to see if I'd keep extra money in my weekly pay (which was cash). Gave me tasks that were difficult to complete and made me feel badly for not completing them, or completing them badly. Crotchety old men came by and chatted for hours about nails and grass seed and their ugly wives and hard-ons they got for young girls. (That's where I first heard that word; in fact, owners and customers alike were real potty mouths; I got quite an education in words and concepts that were new to me.)

Everyone that worked there or shopped there seemed to know more about hardware than I did, and seemed to enjoy the advantage, which was merely age and repetition, but I was too young to know that's all it was, and so was routinely intimidated, and somewhere down deep irreparably deflated.

I could have had a Frank Capra sort of experience there, a hardware version of Mr Gower's drug store, or Ike Godsey's general store off Walton's Mountain, with a lot of polite small-town chatter and a little gossip for local color.

But the reality is that there is a subculture in some types of small business where rudeness, immaturity, condescension, and many other sad human failings are more common than the ones we'd prefer to encounter; and it accounts I think for most of my insecurity regarding tools, machinery, hunting, and other trappings of real men.

[1]
I recall John Dryden saying that when giving examples, three is the best number. He had many reasons for it, including some religious insight, but if you think about it, three is psychologically satisfying in many instances; it feels right, and if you've frequently found yourself drawing comparisons, you know the internal struggle that accompanies how many and what comparisons to choose, for you are considering not only meaning, but meter, appearance, placement, and how one affects its neighbor.

Notice that although “spin and tick and whir” is repeated twice, the second instance is an echo of the first and itself embedded in a three-parts series that begins “grip and snip and measure.”

I went back and forth between “spin and tick and whir” and “spin, tick and whir.” I’m personally fond of “and’s” in series when the meter is looking for something smooth, uninterrupted; it’s storytelling mode. If the spinning and ticking and whirring needed a more staccato touch, the comma would be better.

Incidentally, I suspect the cognitive resonance of three has found realization in many things, including concepts of the Trinity.

Of course, three is not always the right number, but it's a good place to start.

[2]
I originally used the name "George," but have recently blogged about George Zimmerman, who shot and killed Treyvon Martin in Florida. So I changed "George" to "Ralph." Why? To avoid any speculation that that I was making a sympathetic connection. "Ralph" is simple, strong, a little antiquated. I think of Ralph Kramden.

Writers are usually as well aware of what they don't write as what they do.

Started: 2012-03-13