Our local hardware store charges more for much of its merchandise than big box stores, but an employee greets every customer at the door with a smile and an offer of assistance.  Once your greeter has identified your purchase target, he or she guides you to the item and then engages you in as much or as little conversation about the potential variants as you encourage.  The handy guy or gal with no need for advice can smile, nod, thank the clerk and grab what they plan to buy, heading back to the cashier at the front of the store.  The not-so-deft, like me, will stand in front of the daunting rows of choices and cling to every word of advice offered.  I’ve gone to Waldo Hardware and taken advice from the off-duty police officer who works security there.  Thanks to his guidance, I conquered a terrible mouse problem in five days flat.

I decided yesterday to polish a little silver jewelry box that lives on the keeping shelf.  I  have a real jewelry box — large, multi-compartmented — upstairs on my dresser.  This box is about three inches by five inches and quite old, a gift to me from someone well versed in my love of old objects with history.  It has rested on the keeping shelf for five years.  It came to me tarnished and had woefully taken on more black stain as I opened and closed it most days to stash rings before doing dishes or early in the evening to cast off rings when my fingers had swelled from a day of typing.  The box suffered from use, neglect, and disregard.  Its time to shine had come.

I scrounged under the kitchen sink for the Wright’s Silver Polish for several  minutes before I recalled tossing the nearly empty jar when Jenny Rosen and I cleaned the kitchen.  With Jenny in the yard bagging the leaves which Jessica had raked before the first snowfall, I drove to Waldo Hardware for more leaf bags and silver polish, preferably Wright’s.

A silver-haired clerk who seemed to remember me from a prior visit or three called my name before asking what I needed today.  “Leaf bags,” I told him.  “And silver polish.”  His face crinkled and he laughed, long, merrily, asking, “Are you polishing trees?”  He guided me first to the stack of leaf bags where I told him “two packs” and he extracted them, hoisting them easily in his arms.  “Let’s go look for the silver polish,” he suggested.

We stood in front of the display, a bit of chagrin rising in me.  “No Wright’s,” my guide noted, as though like me, he could not fathom using any other brand.  He showed me what they did have and we settled on Goddard’s.  As he rang up my purchases, which had grown to include two storage boxes for the pictures stacked in shoe boxes on the shelves of what is going to be my new laundry center, my clerk asked me to let him know if the Goddard’s worked for me.  I paid him, silently noting that the boxes cost about two bucks more than they would have been at Target.  He carried my purchases to the car, settled them on the back seat, and told me to have a great day and come back if I needed anything else.  “We’ll be here all day,” he assured me, and I thought to myself, That man loves life.

This morning I applied a thin layer of liquid from the bottle of Goddard’s to the surface of the jewelry box.  A half-hour later, I’m fairly certain that I used about a third of the bottle.  My clean square of toweling now sports wide streaks of black, and the silver polishing cloth that I used to buff the surface bears blotches of grey across one half of its cleaning side.  My fingers cramped as I rubbed the box’s crevices.  I see that I will have to find some Wright’s, probably at Target, if I want the job to be completely successful.  But I’m making headway.  The beauty of the box has been awakened.  It’s a small but satisfying step.  I find myself happier at my efforts than a little task like this should make me, but I don’t mind.  I’m not a material girl, but I like a polished old jewelry box as much as anything.  The next time I enter the doorway of Waldo Hardware, I’m showing my clerk the before-and-after photos.  I think he, too, will be pleased.

Before.

After.