Paper Yardsticks
A paper yardstick, a hardware store, and a remark from Hank Green
The hardware store still sells paper yardsticks. I bought one last week for no particular reason, even though I own a tape measure that reaches twenty-five feet and has a reassuring amount of wear on it. The yardstick was leaning in a wooden barrel beside the cash register, and it looked lonely enough that I figured one of us ought to take it home.
Paper yardsticks have a confidence about them. They’re perfectly willing to measure a room, a bookshelf, or the height of a child against a kitchen wall, provided nobody asks them to survive the job afterward. Mine already has a crease across the middle because I forgot it was on the passenger seat and leaned on it while reaching for a grocery bag. A blue jay watched the whole performance from the shopping cart return, and appeared satisfied with the outcome. Birds usually notice that I’m a bear. They also know enough to keep their opinions to themselves.
The fellow at the register was younger than the yardstick by a considerable margin. He scanned it, frowned at the screen for a second, and said he hadn’t realized anybody still bought them. I told him I hadn’t realized they still made them. We both stood there smiling for a moment, neither of us certain who had won the exchange.
Hardware stores have escaped modernization better than most places. Someone’s always carrying a bolt that they need to match, and there’s invariably a retired electrician willing to explain the difference between two nearly identical boxes of screws even if nobody asked. I spent enough years writing a local newspaper column to know that those conversations are typically more useful than the official press conference happening across town. The people who know how things work rarely stand behind a podium.
The newspaper had a business office upstairs where practical decisions were made. Reporters wandered through it carefully, because practical decisions have a way of becoming your problem by the end of the week. Every so often, somebody would explain that we couldn’t try a new idea because the old one had always worked well enough. There was comfort in that sort of thinking. There was also a respectable amount of dust.
I’ve been retired long enough that I don’t miss the idea of deadlines. I do miss overhearing conversations that I wasn’t supposed to hear. Substack has turned out to be a pleasant arrangement, since nobody tells me how many column inches I’ve got left. I do occasionally catch myself wondering where the jump to page three is.
The other morning, I watched a fellow named Hank Green talking about business. He said that when you’re faced with a decision, you ought to pick the weirdest option available to you. I let that bounce around my head for a while. It sounded exactly like the sort of advice an editor would’ve rejected before lunch, and the sort of thing I’d remember after supper.
That sent me back to a photographer I worked with years ago. Charlie carried three cameras, two notebooks, and a harmonica wherever he went. No one ever heard him play the harmonica, although several people claimed they’d seen him take it out while waiting for city council meetings to begin. One afternoon, he abandoned an assignment about a ribbon-cutting when he noticed an elderly man repainting the faded lettering on the window of a shoe repair shop. Charlie came back with photographs of careful hands, tiny brushes, and gold paint catching the afternoon sun. The ribbon cutting made page six. The shoe repairman made the front page.
At the time, I remember wondering how Charlie had talked the editor into it. Looking back, I suspect he never asked. Editors spend their days expecting sensible requests. Now and then somebody hands them something they weren’t expecting, and they discover there was room for it all along.
The yardstick is leaning in the umbrella stand by the front door now. It’s too bent to measure much of anything accurately, although I haven’t thrown it away. Every time I pass it, I find myself wondering what possessed someone to keep making paper yardsticks after everybody switched to tape measures.