Home Depot Away from Home

My father adored Home Depot. And Lowes. Perhaps more accurately, he always loved exactly one of them at a time, and whichever one it was alternated based on where he’d gotten especially favorable or unfavorable service last. He would be on a three-year streak at Home Depot, but then have a particular interaction go especially awry and he’d be a Lowes loyalist for the next few months. In times when the last difficulty had faded at both, he might price-compare or peruse openly, but these times were rare. Sometimes I’d come home and the favored place would have switched, and I’d ask him if we were going to Home Depot and he’d furrow his brow and say “I don’t go to Home Depot any more. It’s Lowes or nothing.”

There were times earlier in my life, times when this alternation trend was less pronounced, when I didn’t ask him if or when we were going. When he would be going, frequently (sometimes every day), to return this or shop for that, to pick up tile or 2x4s or paint or just get a price on joint compound for the next big project. And I would emphatically insist that I would not be going, that I had no interest, that I had better and more interesting things to do than traverse the wide cement aisles under 30-foot warehouse ceilings raftered with exposed high-watt bulbs and wait while he discerned the difference in quality and price between two identical-seeming brands of silver tape. Sometimes he would wheedle or cajole, often in the never-failing belief that I was just on the verge of discovering a latent penchant for engineering, structural design, and decor that had yet to show even the slightest glimmers. But as I grew older, he stopped asking much and we had reached an understanding. I remembered some struggles over especially long trips as a teenager and was thankful not to be asked.

It was years after that when I would call him from Home Depot (or Lowes, but more frequently I was drawn to the siren call of all that orange) myself, seeking advice. No, I never picked up the bug to become a junior architect, but I did need a ladder or spackle or a particular tool and I knew exactly who could tell me what a reasonable going rate might be, what was worth paying extra for and what wasn’t, plus a half-hour of contextual background to boot. We spent hours talking before, during, and after trips to HD about how to deal with the mouse problem in our first Philadelphia apartment, me desperately trying to seal the holes both extant and newly chewed to humanely secure our kitchen. He walked me through how to shop for silver tape, how to lay it down, how to take it up if necessary when we moved out. We discussed board lengths and who to ask to get them cut for free, all the little tips and insights he’d so thoroughly accumulated for years and largely had to keep to himself.

The last of these calls was just a few months ago, late spring, over the size and cost of a proper ladder, the first I’d ever had cause to buy on my own. Graham wandered the aisles taking an interest in various tools and appliances, demonstrating (I noticed) much more visible enthusiasm for the visit than I remember mustering in any of my childhood. “Oooh, this one looks good, daddy!” he would say of a hammer or bucket while I paced the shiny cement floor listening to the tradeoffs of two brands of ladder as passionately described from two time zones away. “Maybe we get this one?”

One of Graham’s favorite authors is Melissa Iwai. He most loves Pizza Day, her written-and-illustrated how-to of a dad making pizza with his son, dough from scratch, toppings plucked that morning from the garden. But a close contender is a book she only illustrated, whose author is Anne Rockwell: Let’s Go to the Hardware Store. In it, a young family moves into a fixer-upper, which the dad uses as an excuse to buy a whole raft of new tools and supplies while his enthralled young children advise. When they get home, of course, they’ve forgotten the most important thing they went out for in the first place, so they have to return that day.

Maybe if I’d grown up with this book (it was published seven years ago), I’d have felt differently about dad dragging me to Home Depot. It wasn’t infrequently, after all, that what I wanted to do instead was stay home and read.

Today, I went to the Conshohocken Home Depot where I’d bought the ladder for the first time since he’d helped me pick it out. I needed a lawn mower and an outdoor broom and a fridge lightbulb and a hose and maybe some foam board to insulate the window around the air conditioner in my son’s room in a way he would have found so easy. I needed to ask him how to do it, I needed to ask him about what mattered in a hose and if the quality would matter for my purposes, what about heavy duty vs. medium duty for hosing off a back deck and occasional watering? I needed guidance on a good price for a mower and what to look out for. Graham tried to help, but it wasn’t the same. “What about this one, daddy?” as he held a lightbulb aloft. “I want to walk over here and look at this.”

I hope he asks me to go back soon.