Monday morning, a man from the bank called about the storefront. I sat down with my coffee, and I told him no.
Sixty-six years old. My knees are shot, my wife has waited on me since 1983, and I am not spending what I have left doing inventory at eleven at night.
He was decent about it. He said if I changed my mind the rate stood through March.
What I did instead was call the library.
Second Saturday of every month, ten to noon, in the Brown County library meeting room, free, no sign-up. Bring the thing that is broken.
Faucets and fill valves in winter. Mower carburetors in spring. Storm windows, disposals, and that ice maker every refrigerator made after 2015 that fails the same way every time.
Eleven people came the first month. There were sixty-four in October and the library made me move to the big room.
I do not sell anything and I have turned down two people who tried to hand me money. If you need the part, I tell you what it is, what it costs, and where it is, and about half the time it is at the chain store two blocks from where I used to work.
Now here is the thing that put the name on it.
Roy Vandermeer wrote his own newspaper advertising. Two inches in the Press-Gazette every Wednesday from 1961 to 2002, forty-one years, and he wrote every one of them himself at the counter.
The ads changed. The last line never did. It ran nine hundred and some times and it is on microfilm at that same library, which is how I got it exactly right.
We would rather sell you the forty-cent part and show you how than sell you the whole thing and let you find out. That is not generosity. We are going to be here when the next thing breaks and so are you.
The class is called The Forty-Cent Part. The library put that on the flyer and I did not argue.
Roy is ninety-one and in a place out on Webster. His daughter brings him twice a year and he sits in the front row and corrects me out loud in front of everybody, and it is the best part of my month.
Brandt came in February. He sat in the back and I saw him and did not say anything, and he came back in March and asked me a question about a sump pump in front of forty people.
He is not a bad kid. He was handed a number and told to hit it, and nobody ever told him where a customer comes from.
He still works there. He sends people to my Saturday, which I did not ask him to do, and his plumbing aisle has a hand-lettered sign on it now that I have not gone in to look at.
My old apron hangs in my basement next to a cash register I am never going to plug in.
He told me we sell product, not advice. A man ran that store for forty-one years and paid for two inches in the newspaper nine hundred times to say the opposite, and it is sitting on microfilm at the public library where anybody with an afternoon could have found it.