Harbor Freight

My partner Dennis is an inveterate jerry-rigger.  You know what a jerry-rig is---a quick, temporary fix that sometimes ends up being permanent.  Like, when the lever on the electric tea-kettle breaks off, you just insert a chopstick.  Works perfectly.  Economical; saves a trip to Target.  Of course, you are one chopstick short for your bowls of rice, but that won’t emerge until much later.  

Jerry-riggers rely on many bits and pieces of stuff for quick fixes---usually sorted into canning jars and loose tea tins that line the back of the workbench in the basement.  But when these riches fail, Dennis reluctantly yields to the last resort: the hardware store.

Dennis used to run to Gill-Roy’s, but the closest one---on Flushing Road---closed.  Not enough business, the staff said.  Property values declined, people stopped fixing things up.  So Dennis found a new hang-out: Harbor Freight.

Harbor Freight Tools is the working persons’ tool and equipment go-to place.  It was founded in 1977 as a catalog company.  It’s still family owned (according to their website).   “At a time when average folks need to stretch their dollars as far as possible, you can count on Harbor Freight Tools to continue to deliver on our founding commitment. Every day we deliver exceptional quality tools at ridiculously low prices.”

Flint’s Harbor Freight is completely average and very dollar stretching.  It’s not the usual place for suburban weekend do-it-yourselfers.  Sometimes you’ll see them---probably sent over from the big box stores.  They look dazed and desperate as they realize they’ve entered vise and drill press land.  

Surprisingly, the Flint store is very female.   Of course, you see a lot of women in Home Depot and Lowes.  They are selecting paint colors or lighting, or bathroom fixtures.  At Harbor Freight women roam the drill bit aisles.  And what’s more, women---middle-aged women---are on the floor helping them with real tools.  Maybe years back they would have worked in the shop.  Today they work at Harbor Freight.

Compared to Home Depot or Lowes, the Harbor Freight store is small.  So small that if I call out to Dennis, he’ll hear me.   The aisles are narrow and the shelves tightly packed.  No bulky ten- foot platform ladders here.   A woman in her fifties girdled in a padded back support belt with suspenders is helping Dennis.  Her name tag says “Patti.” They stand at a side wall that’s lined with drills and circular saws.  I’m sitting on a low stack of wooden dollies.  Dennis ponders an 18 volt 3/8” cordless drill/driver versus a drill/driver that plugs in.  He says he wants the consistent power that comes with a plug in. But the cordless gives you short-time power that’s flexible.  Then, again, the plug in would need an extension cord . . .  They move along the wall; Patti drags her hand lightly across the boxes as she goes.  According to Patti, her husband favored the plug in too, but then it wasn’t handy when he needed it in hard places.  “That’s what I told him,” says Patti.  “So what’s the use of all that power anyway?”   Dennis goes for the cordless.  Patti has won.   

We go to check out.  Now comes the deal: super coupons for free items---tape measures, scissors, and small flashlights.  I have to choose.  We already have a couple of tape measures and several pairs of scissors.  I go for the flashlight; maybe we’ll have a dinner party and use them as favors. 

In Los Angeles we go to Harbor Freight too.  This one’s in Lomita, a small city in LA County that straddles Pacific Coast Highway as it winds along toward Long Beach.   Dennis needs a digital multi-meter, and then maybe some bungee cords, and there’s a bench brush on sale. Clutching his list and a sheaf of Harbor Freight ads, Dennis forges ahead.  Meantime, I hold open the front door for an older woman in glasses with a gray Dutch cut.  She pushes a cart full of stuff toward the parking lot, the crumpled tails of her checked flannel shirt flapping below her old sweat shirt.

Like the Flint store, this Harbor Freight has its own local flavor.  The Lomita mix---white, Hispanic and Latino, Asian, Native American, Black, and Pacific Islander---roams the aisles.   Young Hispanic women stock shelves, or dart into the storeroom.  Young Mexican guys in A-shirts reach top shelves with tattoo-covered arms.  Middle-aged bikers, their gray hair pulled into thin pony tails, cluster in the automotive section.  A tall, elderly white-haired man, so thin that his leather belt holds up his pants in large gathers, confers with his wife, as he methodically turns the 24 pages of ads in the monthly savings book. 

The signs over the aisles are bi-lingual.  I stand with my head tilted back and sound out “cabrestantes” (winches) and “destornilladores” (screwdrivers).   A substantial Spanish vocabulary winds around the predictable layout: power tools, bench top tools, through clasps and clamps (woodworking), to abrasives and hammers, wrenches and sockets, pliers and screwdrivers, and measuring tools.  There’s a small section of odd garden tools.  “Home Accessories” contains a wheelchair and a walker. 

At the cash register the clerk rings up customers in English and answers the phone in Spanish.   She breaks in mid-sentence to offer Dennis an Inside Track Club membership.  Everyday he’d get a new product coupon.  I panic; he declines.  

Some friends tell me Harbor Freight stuff is crap.  But at my age, a life-time warranty holds no allure.  In contrast, entertainment is priceless.  Last year toward the end of summer Dennis came home with battery powered  fly swatter he’d gotten on sale for $3.99 (reg. $7.99).  We sat on the porch in a warm twilight sipping margaritas and swinging at mosquitoes.  Can’t beat Harbor Freight.

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My Mother’s Body

The lilac in my back yard bloomed this spring for the first time since I planted it about ten years ago. In one of my early gardening attempts, I placed it on the north side of the house and too close to the foundation.  It struggled, slow growing in its sun-deprived location.  One of those plantings that should have been removed early, the longer it survived the more misbegotten it looked. It was too strong to pull out.  Each season its woody stems got taller, but its three or four branches produced only large leaves that progressed from light green to a dark, waxy green in summer.  A disappointing syringa vulgaris. My mother had been alive when the lilac went into the ground.   She died at age 91 and has been dead for four years.  And now the surprise: three clusters of blossoms have bloomed at the top of the bush where it grazes the second story---its flowers too high to reach and cut.

Other startling things happened this year.  Getting in to the shower I looked down to see my mother’s thighs. I stared, puzzled at the slack, narrow folds of flesh and the skin with a cross-hatch surface.  The body is mine, but I last saw the flaccid rippled flesh on my mother when I bathed her. Sharp-eyed mavens of female aging term such skin “crapey”.  Can this textile metaphor be apt?  I pinch the skin together in my hands and ponder.  The materials I knew as wool or silk crape made wonderful garments.  The women in my family sewed and they valued crape.  With its soft, submissive hand, the material follows the shape of the body line, comforts the flesh and bones beneath.  In silk the fabric’s complex weave does produce a crimpy surface, but I hadn’t noticed.  


I’ve gotten side-tracked from the shower and sit on the side of the tub, transfixed by my corporeality.  At the tips of my fingers I see my grandmother’s fingernails, narrow and ridged.  I grew up with my grandmother and with the curiosity of a child I observed the details of her body never thinking of it as prophetic of my own.  The ring finger on my left hand crooks slightly sideways as I remember hers did when she was old.  She’s come back to me now, fifty years after her death.  She is in my body, this body which now is becoming the body of my female elders---those to whom I was subordinate, those whom I admired and sometimes feared, those about whom I was curious, and those whom in the 1960s I could disdain.  I am them.

Come six o’clock I’ll raise a large goblet and toast these women and their bodies with red wine.  My mother's drink was scotch.  She wasn’t a connoisseur, but had moved from Dewar’s to Johnny Walker Red.  In the evening she’d pour a couple of fingers and say, at age 86, "I deserve it."  This expression repelled and puzzled me.  A year later, we moved it all---scotch bottles and “Old Fashioned” glasses, along with the chests, pictures, rugs, and clothes.  We crammed it into her one-bedroom apartment in an assisted living complex.  But suddenly the taste for liquor was gone, she said, surprised herself that this long habit of the cocktail hour---the reward of the day---had disappeared and she hardly missed it. 

My grandmother was from Kentucky and drank bourbon.  She said that the tradition was “bourbon and branch water,” a strange expression and the kind of odd phrase an observant child recalls.  Later I learned that branch water meant water from the distillery’s stream that kept the taste of the bourbon pure.  She lived to be 88 and I don’t know when bourbon stopped tasting good to her or reminding her of the South. 


My red wine libation is gentler, especially its lighter variants of pinots, Grenaches, and Syrahs.  Reassured by the diet and health experts that a daily glass is salutary, I measure the pour:  6 ounces is generous, 4 is scant.  I try to hit 5.  If I drink two glasses, the bottles go fast.  A friend is crafting a tray made of wine corks, so I feel helpful as another bottle hits the trash.  For a brief hour or so, my joints and muscles ease.  I remember my mother and grandmother with kindness.


If I am like my mother and grandmother, some twenty-five more years of life are ahead.  I’ve landed in new terrain.  As in a dream I grope intuitively among familiar details that combine strangely with foreign elements.  Like a traveler, I’ve grabbed a guidebook for the major monuments---essays and news reports on age and aging in the New York Times.  Cognizant of a major reader cohort, some Times features reassure an audience purportedly still young---the fifty, sixty, and seventy-year old well-fed and well-educated Americans.  Believers in a “shining future” promised by scientifically supported regimens of exercise, diet, and spirituality.   Relentlessly optimistic.  Other essays are darker. How to obtain care for elderly parents, deal with Alzheimer’s and cancer, broach end of life decisions? Accustomed to a sense of competence, readers seem shocked by the demands of the ancient human family.  Their online comments describe frustration and confusion with these tasks.  Worse, in the shadow of assisting our elders, we touch situations that will engulf us in a few decades.  


Grim. But the mothers in my body signal something else.  They tell me that they are there and powerful.  The burden of responsibility for my mother’s last years of life---once so heavy---has floated away, just like her taste for Johnny Walker.  Now she and my grandmother return in the startling efflorescence of an ordinary lilac, just at the time their genetic traces transform my body. Maybe a reminder of the admirable persistence of life in unappreciated and expected forms.  

 Read more personal essays in East Village Magazine at http://eastvillagemagazine.org/