Humbled Not Humiliated

Or How I Learned to Love the Hardware Store and Myself A Little More

This is a gardenhose.

One of the blessings of my job is that we close our offices for two weeks every summer. Because it’s 2022, I follow a lot of my colleagues on social media and have been witnessing their jaunts and meals, ranging from lobster rolls in Maine to pappardelle in Puglia. 

I, on the other hand, have thoroughly enjoyed doing close to nothing in The Catskills, by choice. 

I spent the majority of my birthday week looking up the names of wildflowers, catching up on reading I have bookmarked in my phone (am I the only one with 632 tabs in Chrome alone?), taking a birthday nap, gardening, and eating perfectly ripe local peaches while leaning over the sink. Hours have deliciously vanished with no place to go, no obligations to keep, no constant ping of the Google calendar reminder: your meeting with so and so is about to begin in 10 minutes, Carla. 

There is something so radical about choosing to putter and loaf. As I recently wrote, we  are told our value comes from doing, doing, doing, and the energy of proving my worth through busyness no longer serves me. The more I step toward a life of creativity, the more I recognize tending to a practice of receiving and allowing is the cornerstone on which creativity is built. (P.S. Doing nothing is still actually a “doing.”)

That’s not to say I have no big plans. I am going to paint our bathroom. This will happen (🤞). In preparation, I went to our local hardware store, a place so foreign to me just a year and a half ago. Not only do I hardly understand the difference between PEX and PVC pipes, but our local hardware store also has its paint section next to animal feed. This is not the type of shopping I am accustomed to enjoying. With that said, I have to give it credit for being the cutest of hardware stores—it’s housed in a wood paneled cabin at the foot of a mountain with a rustic hand-built set of stairs that takes you from the ground floor to the upper level. Rustic chic. 

A young woman, probably 20 or so, helped me with the paint. She was nervous and audibly groaned when I asked if she could help me, explaining it was her first time mixing for a customer. 

“I believe in you,” I told her as she glanced at her coworker, an elderly woman with wide eyes, before walking me toward the paint mixers.

“How long have you been working here?” I asked, trying to make small talk.

“Since August, one year, but I haven’t wanted to learn the paint, just learned this morning,” she said. “I’m more of a fishing and hunting license kinda person. You need one, I can get you one in the office upstairs.” 

I smiled and nodded, vaguely recalling the window nestled between orange vests and camouflage pants and hip waders, a section that had at once intrigued and repelled me. 

She continued, listing the steps involved in mixing paint: 

1. select the base paint

2. type in the formula for the specific paint chip

3. mix the pigment

4. choose the finish

“You got matte, eggshell, semi-gloss or satan,” she said.

“Satan,” I repeated to myself, realizing her mispronunciation of the word “satin” as she continued listing the steps before placing the paint in a metal tumbler that noisily rumbled the colors together. Within a few minutes I was back in the car with my cans of paint after picking up a garden hose in the rear of the store. I left my friends a voice memo about the satan/satin mistake, giggling and feeling a little bad for the girl and the limits of her country upbringing and ignorance.

I found myself thinking about myself at that same age, the year that I moved to New York City with all of my belongings thrown into several garbage bags and no real plan of where my life was going to take me, and no real knowledge of what was in store.

I remember feeling a combination of cockiness, the kind of cockiness that can only exist when you truly have no understanding of what you don’t know, and the sense of awe in learning new and unexpected things—all of the director names of art house films at Angelica, the taste of frog legs at the Thai restaurant around the corner while on a date, or how honey and peanut butter sandwiches are both cheap and delicious (thanks, Eden!). 

At the same time, I also remember feeling embarrassed and self-conscious at how little I knew about surviving in the city and how embarrassed I felt about being unsophisticated and ordinary, making sure everyone knew I was originally from Argentina as soon as possible in order to stave off any thoughts that I was just a bridge and tunnel girl. 

Years later, I had to return to New Jersey to get sober in my mother and grandmother’s basement, the only place I could seem to put together a few days without drugs. I first felt humiliated, then humbled, by the return home and by how little I actually knew of how to live in this world despite having been exposed to many ”sophisticated” and “extraordinary” experiences in The Big City. I had to return home to truly learn about life.  

With those memories held close, I thought about the young girl at the hardware store and the young girl that I had once been and laughed at the mispronunciation of satin and all of the known and unknown flubs I flubbed at that age. I felt a rush of love for both of us and prayed for continued lessons.

The next day, I was back at the store saying hello to my new acquaintance, sheepishly asking if I could exchange the hose I’d bought for the garden hose I needed.

“Oh yeah, that says irrigation,” she said, bringing me back to the aisle.

“They look like this,” she continued while pointing to the rack I’d overlooked. “Easy mistake.”