Hinges. What are they? Most people don’t think about hinges. I didn’t think about hinges either, until my moustache began tingling this morning over breakfast — a breakfast I paid for myself, I might add, despite the fact that the New Pickax Hotel still hasn’t comped my meals after everything I’ve done for this town. But I digress.
A hinge is a device that connects two things. It allows a door to open and close. Without hinges, doors would simply fall over. Is that something we want? I think not.
Koko, as usual, understood the significance of hinges long before I did. He sat at the barn door yesterday, staring at the upper hinge for forty-five minutes without blinking. Yum Yum, meanwhile, batted at the lower hinge with one delicate paw, clearly conducting some form of structural analysis. These are not ordinary cats. I have said this before and I will say it again, probably next week.
Speaking of doors, the hardware store on Main Street was broken into last Tuesday. The third burglary this month in Pickax, which is statistically unremarkable for a town of three thousand where someone is murdered roughly every six weeks. The thieves took, among other things, hinges. Who steals hinges? My moustache twitched violently when I heard this, and I made a note to stay home that evening, establishing what some might call an alibi but what I call a quiet night of reading.
I replaced the hinges on the barn’s east entrance last spring. The K Fund covered it as a “heritage property maintenance expense,” which is perfectly legitimate and not worth discussing further. Do squirrels care about hinges? They do not, and yet they continue to exploit every loose one to infiltrate my birdseed storage.
Why don’t more columnists write about hinges? Because they lack commitment. Because their cats don’t push books about metallurgy off shelves at three in the morning. Because their moustaches are silent, ordinary moustaches.
Hinges.
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