The Proprietorship

Grab your wallets, ladies of Columbus! A new store is open for business! If you live around here, I have surely piqued your interest, as retail isn't exactly the bread and butter of this area. You are probably dreaming of a place to buy really cute clothes, and I'm sorry to kill your buzz, but this store only sells one thing--hangers.

Exposing his entrepreneurial side, Luke has decided to go into business for himself. His hanger store is open during very limited hours--when I'm doing laundry. The proprietor goes to somewhat unethical means to build his inventory, i.e. snatching the pile of hangers that I was using to hang up my clothes. He then goes about displaying them from my headboard.



At first, you think the customer service is going to be spot-on. He seems like a really attentive sales associate. "Hello, welcome to my hanger store," he chirps, "Would you like to buy a hanger?"

Don't be fooled. The service is lousy. Just when I get in the mood for an impulse buy, I ask, "May I have a green hanger?" and he goes and hands me a wire one. Like, the kind the dry cleaner sends back with the good-for-nothing cardboard tube. He's known his colors for a year now. This is no honest mistake. It's a control game, and I'm thinking about calling the Better Business Bureau if it doesn't stop.

"What is this," I ask, "Communist Cuba? I said I want the green one. Give me the one I want." Luke stares at me and blinks a couple times. It doesn't faze him, though, he goes right back to removing hangers from clothes that I was about to put away in my closet and hanging them on my headboard.

This is a welcome change from the last game that kept me from getting my laundry done. The one wherein Luke takes my laundry baskets, or "nets", and we spend the next three hours pretending he is a seahorse, sea turtle, goldfish, dolphin, crab, octopus, Loch Ness Monster, or whatever other water creature he can think of. I throw the "net" over him, he laughs hysterically, and I long to make a necklace very similar to those candy necklaces we used to wear in grade school, but instead of candy, it has Valium on it. (Honest--the only medication I take is over-the-counter Claritin a couple times a week.)

Anyway, I digress. Luke is serious about his business. On Friday night, it was nearly bedtime. I announced that it was time for two little boys to take a bath, and do you know what he said? He said verbatim, "Sorry, I can't make it. I have a meeting."

"A meeting? What kind of a meeting?"

"A store meeting," he said, and then he disappeared into George's closet, or as it's known around here, "Luke's elevator". The door slid shut, and I'll be darned if I didn't hear him say something about last quarter's profits.

A meeting on a Friday night! Is he a workaholic, or just chasing the American Dream? Either way, I think he's loving his work, because last night, he announced at dinner that he was going to start selling hot dogs at his store. "Product diversification--not a bad idea," I told him.

At this rate, I will get to have 24 karat gold faucets in the pool house he builds me on his property in my silver years. I could get really passionate about hangers (and hot dogs).