Attic Salt for April 13, 2008
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I’d beaten closing time at Hobby Lobby on a weeknight by 15 minutes. Standing in the check-out line, I had what it would take to turn a bicycle’s front gear ring into a piece of art that would tell time.
I was feeling good about myself, the evening, the idea of time and the many uses to which bicycle gears may be put besides chewing the cuffs of blue jeans.
For me, most days end with a bicycle ride around University and City Park lakes to pursue the record of most orbits on a bicycle around people who are fishing. “The Guinness Book of World Records” has to but create the category, and I’m in. Then, it’s usually home, dinner, book or Netflix. I don’t care what I fall asleep over as long as it’s not hot or liquid.
That evening, I and other citizens watching television with their eyes closed were suddenly thrown into their street clothes, fingers wrapped around their car keys and hurled out the door by Crafts Carl.
Crafts Carl is the irresistible voice that makes us take things — bicycle gears, Popsicle sticks, fake flowers — with specific purposes and turn them into nonspecific art. The specific purpose of fake flowers is to stand in for real flowers while attracting dust that would otherwise gather on the piano.
Some of us hear Carl’s siren call louder and more often than others. That allows a place like Hobby Lobby to exist. People who are deaf to Carl’s decrees to turn the mundane into the unnecessary make fun of sensitive souls who see the potential in wire, clay, wooden dowels, colored paper, free-standing letters of the alphabet, paint in small bottles, and framed pictures of strangers on horseback or standing in front of beach houses.
I had not heard Carl in the longest time, though the piece of driftwood I’d turned into a whimsical model of the aircraft carrier USS Intrepid is a daily reminder to my wife to keep the glue locked up.
Standing in line, secure in the knowledge that I had the makings of a clock, I was free to notice the women ahead of me flinching with each sound of breaking glassware behind us.
The store’s young male employees had swathed shelves in Saran Wrap before moving the shelves AND their merchandise. Possibly, Carl can be heard INSIDE as well as outside Hobby Lobby.
Another crash — glass or pottery — and the women scrunched their shoulders to their ears as though the workers were playing catch with Ming vases and missing every fifth one.
“Making a clock,” I said to the flincher in front of me to break the tension.
“Putting together a scrapbook,” she said, half turning but not turning all the way for fear of seeing some cherished craft or knickknack reduced to a 3-D jigsaw puzzle.
Walking to my truck in the parking lot, the sense of urgency was gone. Carl had called. I’d answered. When the glue dried, “cured” that is, in 48 hours, I’d have a clock I didn’t need, one that I’d made with my own two hands.
