 |
| Oh yeah that is the one right there the object of my desire. |
I mentioned that nails were one of the two choke points in the
construction of ever bigger and better forts. The second was, of
course, wood. Besides recycling and theft we didn't have much of a
method to get more wood because no one in town sold it and we had no
way to transport it anyway. The nails were always available, at a
price. When we had some money from a birthday windfall or a payment
for a job my brother and sister and I would get on our bikes and head
up to main street and drop into the only hardware store in Santaquin,
Stringham's hardware. Stringham's was a nail buyers paradise they had
long ones short ones and the greatest nail of them all a glue coated
one that we called 'sinkers'. Those nails would heat up as they were
driven and the glue would melt and fix the in place which was good,
they cost about twice as much as regular nails which was bad. We
would head into the store and over to the huge bins of nails that
were on a spindle in the center that would spin around letting you
weigh you fastening options. Yes, you could walk right in a grab the
three fingered nail hook and drag out a couple of pounds of 16 penny
nails and be on your way, but you would miss out on the delicious agony of
selection. What if we were to get the smaller cheap nails for
paneling and roofing and extended our nail buying dollar? What ratio
of short to long will get that new wing built today? These were the
pressing questions that the youthful and poverty stricken nail buyer
always had to consider. We were not good at getting the right amount
for the money we had so we would tell the owner Kurt what our budget
was and he would help us sort out the best bang for our nail buying
buck. I even noticed one time that he was quite generous on the
weighing when he was getting us some nails and it was well over the
two pounds of nails we could afford at the listed price. It was a
couple of cents worth of nails but I thought the world of a guy who
is not stingy in the measure when it comes to helping kids build. We
would take our nails home giddy with the possibilities and we could
once again expand the danger of our construction up and out and back
up again. One nail, and hopefully no more, at a time.
