What Opens First on Main Street

Leaving at twenty past six

An hour of driving, of which the first thirty-five minutes are dull and the last twenty-five are not. The road drops into a river valley, crosses a stone arch culvert with a low rail, and then runs straight into the south end of town past a fairground with its gates chained.

I arrive around seven twenty. Parking is angled, unmetered, and untimed before nine, which the town pages confirm and which the painted marks contradict slightly. Everybody parks a little wide. I have started doing it too, which I mention because it took three visits to stop feeling rude about it.

The first thing you notice is that the street is not empty. There are eleven cars parked along four blocks, and most of them belong to people who are already inside somewhere, doing something you cannot see. A street can be full of activity and completely still at the same time. Ours in Manchester never manages it.

The order things open in

I have kept notes, which is embarrassing but useful, and between what I have seen and what the owner told me, the order is consistent.

1. The bakery windows are lit by five thirty, with the door locked and the lights on in the back only.
2. The hardware store unlocks at seven, and its owner sweeps the entry before turning the sign.
3. The diner opens at seven fifteen, and by seven twenty-five it has nine people in it.
4. The town offices, the barber shop, and the two gift places open somewhere between eight thirty and nine.

The gap between the third item and the fourth is the whole reason I keep going. For roughly seventy minutes, the street belongs to people who work with their hands and people who eat breakfast in public. Nothing is arranged for a visitor. There is no bin of maps, no sandwich sign, no music coming out of a doorway.

At seven forty a truck backs into the loading gap between two buildings and a man unloads flats of something without speaking to anyone. At seven fifty the crossing lights switch from flashing yellow to their full sequence, which happens on a clock and startles me every single time.

Inside the hardware store

Wooden floor, oiled dark, with a soft dip worn into it in front of the fastener aisle. The building is narrow and deep, maybe twenty-two feet across and eighty feet back, with a mezzanine along the left side reached by stairs that turn once.

The fasteners are in wooden drawers with brass pulls and handwritten labels, and the handwriting is from at least three different people across probably forty years. You open a drawer, you find washers, you close it. Nobody has attempted to improve this system, and I would like to shake the hand of whoever keeps declining to.

Chain hangs on a rack by the back wall in seven gauges, and you carry the end to a cutter mounted on the counter. The man who cut mine asked what it was for. I said a gate that swings shut too hard. He said six feet was too much and cut me four and a half, which is the correct amount, and he was right, and it took him nine seconds to be right.

The hinges took longer, because I had brought the old one in a bag and it turned out to be a size that stopped being standard some time ago. We looked at four options. He recommended the one that required drilling two new holes, on the grounds that the alternative would fail within a year. That conversation cost me eleven minutes and saved me a second trip.

The local historical society pages say this commercial block was rebuilt after a fire in 1911, which explains why the storefronts are the same height and the brickwork matches down the whole run. The store has been a hardware store for most of that time under several owners. None of that is on a sign anywhere. I had to go looking for it after I got home.

Coffee in the car, which I recommend

Nothing on the street sells coffee before seven fifteen, and after that the only place that does is the diner, which by seven twenty is a room of regulars where a stranger is a small event. I have eaten there once and enjoyed it. I have also learned that I do not always want to be an event.

So the thermos rides in the passenger footwell, and I sit in the car with the window down two inches and drink it while the street fills. This is the part of the errand I would defend hardest and can justify least. Twenty minutes, no phone, watching a place get to work.

At eight fifteen a school bus turns at the north light. At eight twenty the town office lights come on. By eight forty-five the street looks like any other small main street in New England, pleasant and unremarkable, and the thing I came for has quietly ended.

Then I drive home with a paper bag holding two hinges and four and a half feet of chain.

Worth the errand

For me, three times over. It is two hours of driving for one hour of watching and about twenty minutes of actual business, and I have stopped pretending the ratio is the point.

Be realistic about what is there. Before eight, the only public restroom is inside the diner, and using it means being a customer, which is fair. The sidewalks are old and the granite curb has a high step at two corners. The hardware store has a single step at the entry and narrow aisles with stock on the floor, so it will not work for everyone. The mezzanine is stairs only.

Go on a weekday. Saturday morning the street is busy by eight and the whole character shifts, which is fine and is simply a different errand. Bring your own coffee, bring the broken part you are trying to match, and be prepared to be told your measurement is wrong.

Mine was wrong. The gate closes properly now.