In the Bag

I’ve never been a big tool guy. The few tools I’ve had are a mishmash of screwdrivers, wrenches, pliers, and the strangest pair of wire cutters my dad use to use to cut the wire on bundles of newspapers, that I’ve collected, inherited, and purchased on impulse. By the time my wife gave me a San Francisco Giants tool bag, I had pretty much all I needed to put up a shelf, bend a nail, fix a flat on a bicycle, changed the oil in a car, or pry open a can of paint.

If manlyhoodness is judged by the size of a man’s tool belt or his relationship with the Snap-on truck driver, then I suppose my might come into question. Perhaps my saving grace was purchasing and cordless drill a few years back.

During our move from our big house to a smaller house, it seemed that whenever I was at one and needed a tool, I had left my tool bag at the other. So I started bringing it with me. On the second to the last trip, I had folded down the back seats of my car so I could have access to the trunk from the interior of the car and vice versa. This afforded me the ability to put longer items in a small car. I put my tool bag on the backs of the folded down seats, sort of half in and half out of the trunk. I did some painting and had used the largest flathead screwdriver to pry and old can open. I remember putting the screwdriver/paint can opener away and then locking up the house and driving to the new one. I don’t remember taking the tool bag out. I haven’t seen it since.

(As a side note; why do they still make flathead screws? I’ve never turned a flathead screw without having the screwdriver fling out of the screw and either gouge a channel in some piece of sheetrock or wood that I wanted to keep gouge free, or take the first 17 layers of skin off my thumb. Phillips seems like the wave of the future 50 years ago.)

So my tool bag is gone. Every screwdriver, except for the one pictured, every open, Crescent, socket, and Allen wrench, my vice grips, and wire cutters gone, all gone. I suppose it could be in the pile of “belongings” in our new garage, but I’ve looked and looked to no avail. Besides, having been in my car for one of the final loads, it would be on top of that pile. My fear is that it was stolen; taken from my car while I did a final walkthrough of the room were I touched up the paint.

I don’t blame the economy, people steal when the opportunity presents itself; say in the form of an open car with the final flotsam and jetsam of a family with really too much stuff. I’m not surprised whoever it was passed over the broken pole saw and the shards of terracotta pots and instead reached for the tool bag. Thoughtfully provided with a handle.

Now I must take stock of what tools I need to maintain a home and acquire new ones. I supposed I could scour yard sales, estate sales, and garage sales and put together a new (to me) set over time. Maybe I could go out to the Cherry Auction, if that’s still going on, and purchase a complete set at one time and low price. There’s always borrowing.

(Another side note: there should be a law that you can’t call it an estate sale if your inventory consists of just an old stationary bicycle, some VHS tapes, and a 14-year-old fax machine in your driveway.)

To the person who took my tool bag I just want to say, “I hope you needed it, or the money you got for selling it, more than I do. I hope you are a modern day Jean Valjean, in non-fictitious Les Miserables who only took it as a last resort to feed starving family members. I probably should have left some bread out instead.

Going Rouge

Let me ask you this outright: What do you think when you hear Fresno? Is your answer in the Podunk, middle-of-nowhere, or perhaps fly-over category? Do you see a wasteland where the only culture is in the yogurt, art left town with a museum that long ago was unable to pay its bills, and entertainment is something between Monster Trucks and that jumping/flipping motorcycle thing they do?

When Johnny Carson’s monolog was in danger of bombing he could always pull the crowd back with a Fresno barb. It’s been a punch line in Thelma and Louise, Monsters vs. Aliens, and Captain America. But is there a shred of another side to the Raisin Capitol of the World? A more sophisticated side?

Somewhere between the orange groves in the foothills and the vineyards on the west side, between the older homes with swamp coolers hanging from their windows and the newer McMansions with 8 ½ X 11 computer paper foreclosure notices taped to theirs, and between the Subaru’s of Old Fig Garden and the Suburbans of Clovis I stumbled into something I didn’t know existed in the town of my birth.

It’s called the Rouge Festival and it takes place over ten days in the Tower District in the center of town. The people who put it on call it a, “swirling circus of originality and creativity.” It’s basically a bunch of acts in different venues over 10 days.

Walking the sidewalks from venue to venue, crowded with people on their way to or from a show and performers passing out flyers was like being in another town. When I explained to one of our friends how when I was a kid we would wait in line to see Disney movies at the tower theater and when I found the New Deal WPA stamp in the sidewalk across from the Chicken Pie Shop it was like being in a different Fresno.

On Saturday we went to three shows, all comedies.

The first was called, “Confessions of a Church Organists.” It was true stories from a man who played the organ in a Catholic church, and at weddings and even the old Pizza and Pipes restaurant. It was nostalgic, somewhat vulgar, and most importantly; funny.

The second act was someone called Captain Scurvy. He was kind of like George Carlin with Christopher Walken’s voice. Again very funny. His “you might be in Fresno” bit got things rolling; “if you can see a DUI check point from another DUI check point, you might be in Fresno.”

The third act was an improve group made up of three twenty-somethings. Like Whose Line is it Anyway but local.

The Pièce de résistance, if you’ll pardon and recognize my French, was Sunday when we went and saw an act called The Sparrow and the Mouse. It was a one woman act where the performer, Melanie Gall, told stories about Edith Piaf and her best friend and half-sister Simone. But most importantly she sang, mostly in French, Piaf’s most famous songs. Her voice was beautiful and even though I probably recognize a total of 10 words in French, (omlette de fromage) in the dark and tiny club I could feel my eyes tearing up during certain songs. Must be the French blood.

So Fresno has some culture because we have history, we can laugh at ourselves, and we can recognize and appreciate true beauty even in a language we don’t understand.