My name is Harold Pfeiffer. I am 64 years old and I live in a small town in central Wisconsin with my wife Arlene. My father opened Pfeiffer Hardware on Main Street in 1938. I have run it since 1961. This September I closed it.

My grandson Nick set up this page and showed me how to type the entries and send them up. He says people will read it. I doubt that, but he's a good boy, and it gives me something to do in the mornings, which, as you'll see, has become a question.

Sunday, September 26, 1999

Church at 8:30. Pastor Jim preached on Ecclesiastes, a time to every purpose under heaven, and I would bet money Arlene talked to him beforehand. She says she did not. She has been married to me going on 41 years and she still thinks I can't tell.

In the afternoon we watched the golf on television, the Ryder Cup, where the Americans came back from way down. I don't golf. I watched the whole thing anyway. Arlene brought me coffee and said, "Look at you, a man of leisure." I said I'm a man of something.

Last night was the harvest moon and we sat out on the back step and looked at it. We have not sat on the back step on a Saturday night in I don't know how long, because Saturday nights I did the week's books at the kitchen table. I said the moon was the color of a brass washer that's been in the bin too long. She said that is the least romantic thing anybody ever said about the moon. That's probably true.

Eight days now. Dale called to say he starts out at the place on the bypass October 4th. Paint department. Good benefits, better than I ever could give him. I told him I was glad for him, and I am. I drive the long way around to avoid Main Street, and then I turn around and drive past the building anyway.

Weather: 61 and clear. Good day to put up storm windows. I put up ours.

Monday, September 20, 1999

Woke up at 5:20 like always. Shaved, put on my work pants and the green shirt, and got as far as the car before I remembered.

I sat in the car in the garage a while. Arlene came out in her robe and knocked on the window and asked was I all right. I said I was fine, I was just deciding. She asked deciding what. I didn't have an answer for that.

So I went uptown to the café and had coffee with the fellows who have been having coffee there every morning since Eisenhower. If I'm honest I always looked down on those men a little. They sit there till half past nine fixing the farm economy. Today I sat with them. Nobody said a word about the store, which I appreciated. Elmer, who is 91 and was a customer of my father's before I was born, said, "Welcome to the club." Then they talked about the Packers.

Home by twenty to ten. Mowed the lawn, which didn't need it. Cleaned the gutters, which did. Arlene has a list on the refrigerator, held up with a Pfeiffer Hardware magnet. We have about thirty of those magnets.

Tonight I asked her what she wants to do now. She said she has wanted to see the fall colors up in Door County for forty years, and we never went because October is storm window season. I said we could go. She cried a little. I didn't know she'd been holding on to that one.

Saturday, September 18, 1999

Last day.

I opened at 7:30 like every Saturday. Dale was already on the sidewalk holding two coffees. We went in together and didn't turn on the radio.

There wasn't much left to sell. Some bins of odd bolts, paint in colors nobody wanted (there's a reason it was still there), furnace filters, a box of cup hooks. People came anyway. That is what I want to put down here. They didn't come to buy anything. They came to stand around.

Marlys came in and said her husband bought the hinges for their front door here in 1962, and they're still on and they still don't squeak. I said I remembered, which wasn't so, but it was true enough. A boy about ten bought the last pocketknife with his own money and I didn't charge him the tax. Don't tell the state. The fellows from the feed mill brought a sheet cake from the bakery that said THANKS HAROLD in blue frosting. Somebody cried. It was not me. It was Dale.

At five o'clock I did what my father did every night for 23 years and I did every night for 38. I counted the drawer. Then I turned the lights off from the back to the front, the way he taught me, so you're never walking in the dark. I locked the front door. I tried the handle twice. Then I stood there a while longer than a man needs to stand to be sure a door is locked.

Arlene was waiting at the curb. She told me later she'd been parked there since 4:30 because she wanted to be the one to drive me home. On the way she put her hand on my knee and said, "Harold, you did good." She has said a lot of things to me in 41 years. I'm not sure she ever said that one.

Then she said, "And now you're home for supper." And I understood that for her it has been 38 years of supper kept warm in the oven, and Saturdays, and Christmas Eve until noon, and the winter of '79 when the furnace went out at the store and I slept there two nights. She's relieved. She has a right to be.

We had pork chops. I don't remember them.

Friday, September 17, 1999

Last night as a storekeeper. Counted what's left. Not much. Arlene says come to bed. More tomorrow.

Tuesday, September 14, 1999

Signed the papers on the building this morning. Gary at the bank shook my hand like somebody had died. The buyers are a young couple from Madison, Julie and Scott, who are going to put a coffee shop in the front and used books in the back. They showed me drawings. The drawings had the old tin ceiling cleaned up and the oak floor sanded. I have been walking on that floor since I was four years old. I never once thought of sanding it.

They asked could they keep the sign painted on the brick on the side, PFEIFFER HDWE, that Dad had put up after the war. I said they'd have to ask the brick. They asked could they call the coffee shop something with Pfeiffer in it, and I said please don't, it would be like somebody wearing my clothes. They were nice about it.

The price was fair. More than Dad paid and less than it would have been in 1985. I'll leave it at that.

On the news tonight they showed the cars lined up out of Florida trying to get away from the hurricane. Arlene said, those poor people. I thought, every hardware store from Miami on up is selling plywood tonight, and some of them won't be there next year either.

Friday, September 3, 1999

Everybody who comes in has a story, and I can't keep them all in my head, so Nick put a spiral notebook on the counter and a pen on a string. He says it's like a guestbook. Forty pages so far. A few, copied out without names:

• Bought my first box of deer shells here when I was 12. Harold's dad made me bring a note from my mother.
• You told me not to buy the expensive faucet, the cheap one would do. That was 19 years ago. You were right.
• Thank you for letting us run a tab in 1981.
• My kids learned to make change at your counter.

That third one. I remember 1981. The plant laid off that spring and half the town had a tab. Dad kept tabs in a green ledger and I kept them in the same green ledger. Most paid. Some took ten years. A few never did and I don't hold it against them. The place out on the bypass doesn't have a green ledger. I'm not saying that to be bitter. I'm saying it because it's so.

Closed Monday for Labor Day, like always. Funny to take a holiday from a store that's closing, but Arlene says rules are rules.

Saturday, August 21, 1999

Second week of the sale. Forty percent off everything now. The shelves have gaps in them like a mouth with teeth out.

People I haven't seen in years. A man bought three hundred dollars of tools and paint and said, "I wish I'd come in here more." I said, "So do I." It came out sharper than I meant it. He looked at the floor and I looked at the register and neither of us knew what to do. I threw in a putty knife.

The home center opened out on the bypass in the spring of last year. I won't name it. If you live around here you know which one. It has a garden center bigger than my whole store. Our sales went down by a third the first year and kept going. I drove out there once to look. It was clean and bright and a young man in an apron asked could he help me find something. I said no thank you, I was just looking, and that was the truth. He was a nice kid. I don't blame him for anything.

Sold the key machine today to a locksmith from Wausau. I cut keys on that machine for 30 years. He put it in his truck like it was a key machine.

Monday, August 9, 1999

Nick says the first entry should explain things. All right.

Pfeiffer Hardware will close for good on Saturday, September 18. The sign went up in the front window this morning. Nick lettered it. It says EVERYTHING MUST GO, which is true of most things if you wait long enough.

My father opened in 1938 with two aisles and a nail keg. I started sweeping for him at eight years old. He handed me the keys in 1961 when his heart gave out on him, and I was 26 and thought I knew everything. I have sold nails by the pound, cut glass, fixed screens, mixed paint, and told a great many men which end of a pipe wrench to pull on.

Arlene and I sat at the kitchen table in June with the numbers. I am 64. Dale has worked for me 22 years and some months lately I paid him out of our savings. You can do that for a while. Then you can't.

That's all I have to say about it tonight.

Weather: Hot. Sold four fans before noon.