Los Gatos Weekly-Times Evil spirits are haunting the Giant Hardware Store By Carl Heintze Native Americans, or First People, as Canadians call them, believe there's a spirit in everything--trees, deer, mountains, rocks and rivers. I've extended that theology to include objects manmade and otherwise. This blinding revelation came to me a couple of weeks ago. It happened when we decided we needed a blind in the bathroom. I carefully measured the window sideways and up and down, wrote down the measurements and repaired to the Giant Hardware Store nearby for a blind. The Giant Hardware Store is filled with inanimate and fearsome objects, all of which I am now convinced have spirits, most of them evil. After a long search through the Giant Hardware Store's fearsome aisles, I found the blinds department tucked in the rear. There were lots of blinds. None, of course, matched my measurements. But, I discovered, the spirit of the blinds had thought of this contingency and had provided a machine, something like a lathe, that cuts the blind to your measurement. A nice young man snapped the blind into the machine, gave it a couple of whirls, and there you were: a 3414-inch blind. He also gave me the two brackets with which to mount the blind. One bracket had a hole in it and the other a notch. Happy at all this, I packed my blind, the brackets and myself home and set out to install my new treasure. But the spirit of the blind had other ideas. First, the little nails that came with the brackets were too short. They would not hold the brackets or the blind in place when I tried to pull on it. Secondly, in accordance with the Heintze law that everything mechanical I do has to be done at least twice, I got the blind up backward. Because it turns out, there are two sides to a blind, or at least there were to this one, one blue and one white. I needed for the white side to be facing into the room, and of course, because I had not unwound the blind before I put it up, only the blue side showed. Nothing to be done but to take down the blind and brackets, reverse the brackets--with longer nails, but when I did this, the spirit of the blind which I had by now thoroughly awakened, struck back. I can only assume the blind did not suffer home repairmen who are all thumbs. Whatever it was, I found the blind had been cut a quarter-inch too short. The blind kept falling out of the brackets. Indeed, the brackets themselves kept falling. One of them, to my displeasure, fell into the toilet. I will not tell you the incantation I uttered when this happened. But I decided the best thing to do was get out of the bathroom for a while. After calming myself, I went in search of a piece of wood at least a quarter of an inch in thickness, something not easy to find in our house. Finally, I cut off the end of an old paint-stir paddle, drilled a couple holes in it, got even longer nails and re-installed the brackets. This time the spirit of the blind seemed to be silent. The blind fitted in the brackets; it went up and down as it was supposed to and it has been working ever since. But the whole process only convinced me that inanimate objects, even those manmade, have what the Algonquin First People used to call "manitou." I'm not sure what manitou is or how it came to reside in the blind, but I believe in it, nevertheless. Now whenever I go in the bathroom--which, of course, is every day--I always offer a silent prayer to the spirit of the blind. And, of course, since it is the bathroom, I also make what is usually a small sacrifice. Sometimes, though, it's a large one. Big or small, I'm sure the spirit of the blind must appreciate it. Because the blind keeps on working just fine. Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Los Gatos Weekly-Times. [ Back to Contents Page | Los Gatos Weekly-Times Home Page | Archives ] This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, November 4, 1998. ©1998 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.