RIVER CITY JOURNAL: IN THE BIG PICTURE, SMALL VICTORIES ARE LIFE'S TROPHIES

Call this another chapter in the adventures of a man who is set loose in a big store with a small list.

Maybe this has happened to you too. You go to a store for a particular item -- three-way light bulbs, for example -- and you walk out with a 10-horsepower chipper-shredder with all-wheel drive and an overhead-cam engine.

It could happen.

After all, the wind did blow down a lot of limbs recently.

This week I went to a home-improvement retail establishment. It is not good for me to go to this store alone. Or with a credit card. Like most men, I am entitled to charter membership in Home-Improvement Center Suckers Anonymous.

There was a good reason for me to go to this particular store. I needed some more hose gizmos like I bought a couple of years ago that let me hook the hose to the faucet with a quick snap. Not only that, these gizmos let me hook up watering devices to my hose with the same easy snap.

Yes, I know the world of convenience has reached unimaginable heights, but why wrestle with a balky hose and an even balkier faucet if a simple snap will do?

They tell me you can determine the age of a rattlesnake by the number of rattlers it has. Not that I've ever counted. Or the age of a tree by the number of rings on a cross-section of the trunk.

You can tell the age of most men who mow their own lawns by the number of hoses they own. Not that all of the hoses are necessarily useful, having been split open by freezing weather or run over by lawn mowers or even by 10-horsepower chipper-shredders with all-wheel drive.

In any event, I needed more of those hose gizmos. And I wanted all my various hoses to be compatible -- that is, if I want to use the watering wand on one hose, I'd like to be able to snap it to any of the other hoses that have specific and important purposes around my house.

So I went to the home-improvement store where I bought the gizmos in the first place so I would be sure to get the exact same gizmo again.

At the store, my eyes were on the hose-repair department -- honest to goodness, there is such a department at this store -- but my feet were headed down a main aisle. I quickly learned why. Like most stores that cater to the whims of men who have money to spend, home-improvement stores lure you with the ad for three-way light bulbs that last for 20,000 lumens -- I have no idea what a lumen is -- but put up the display of table saws right inside the entrance.

In this case, instead of table saws there were rows of parked lawn mowers. Gleaming. Brightly colored. Self-propelled. Some with seats on them.

You need to know that I am the proud owner of a 6.6-horsepower self-propelled mulching lawn mower that eats up my grass like a hog at a trough full of shorts soaked in curdled milk. So I had no interest in buying another lawn mower.

No, what caught my eye was this particular model whose newest advancement in the world of lawn mowers is a device that adjusts the speed of self-propelled mowers to your walking speed. Walk fast, and the mower goes faster. Walk slow, and the mower idles to a crawl.

New technology costs money, of course, so these fancy mowers aren't what you would call low-end goods.

Of course, I remember the lawn mower from my youth that always went exactly as fast as you did. It was the old-style rotary mower with the scissor-like blades that you pushed. This was the mower that worked fine in bluegrass under an elm tree but was virtually no match for the crabgrass out in the full sunlight where the dishwater got thrown after every meal. (Remember dishpans?)

Not many people use those old rotary mowers any more, although I occasionally see one. While we were on vacation recently in Oregon, we saw a group of young women at the oceanfront house next to ours taking turns with a rotary mower. They regarded it not as a lawn mower but as exercise equipment. Go figure.

After about 30 minutes of drooling over all those shiny lawn mowers, I realized I wasn't there because I needed help with the lawn.

Now this is the part some of you will understand all too well.

I stood there for another 10 or 15 minutes trying to remember why I was in the home-improvement store in the first place.

My wife sends me to the deep-freeze in the basement for something and holds her breath until I call up from below: "What am I getting?" So you see what I'm up against.

Finally, I remember the hoses and found the gizmos I needed and headed home.

Guess what? Sometime over the past two years, the manufacturer of the gizmos has decided to reverse its design. Instead of snapping the hose onto the faucet, now the faucet snaps onto the hose. Which means if I want all my hoses and faucets to be compatible, I have to buy all new gizmos.

That's modern marketing for you. You know what? I was so pleased with myself for remembering what I went for that I really didn't care.

As you get older, small triumphs are worth their weight in gold.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.