RDP Thursday: DESTINY

There’s a warehouse on Prefontaine Street that is, as far as old buildings go, a very unremarkable building.

It doesn’t have gargoyles standing guard along the roof tops. The windows have wooden frames that need paint and the address has been rubbed away by the elements, but it doesn’t matter because the same half dozen people go in and out of it a few times a month at the most.

Nobody goes looking for the drab gray building on the corner of Prefontaine and Jackson.

What is remarkable is a quiet series of events that happened on the top floor in 1948 that no one noticed because there was nothing to notice.

In 1948 Phillips Hardware rented one of the floors to store some of their merchandise when their stockroom flooded.

A man named Sam Agosti worked for Phillips and he was one of the clerks helping with the move. Sam moved about a dozen boxes of hammers and a half dozen boxes of rope and then he got a call that his wife was headed for the hospital to deliver their child so he left after his second trip into the warehouse.

It was a busy day for Sam and he was distracted for a few reasons so he ended up putting the boxes on the wrong floor and they stayed there moldering away for a good twenty years.

The rats got the rope and over the  years the hammers were picked up and used around the building and a few of them made their way out into the world.

One of Sam Agosti’s  misplaced hammers ended up on the tool belts of a few construction workers and one made it’s way from one construction worker’s tool box to the ‘junk drawer of a woman named Pamela- who counted the construction worker as one of her many ‘gentleman callers ‘.

Her construction worker named Paul,  his hammer and his aging body  languished in Pamela’s house for another 30 odd years.

One day  Paul caught Pamela in his work room entertaining her most recent gentleman caller on his workbench.

She was wearing the Gentleman’s hat with the logo for the bus company he worked for and nothing else.

Unnoticed by the Bus Driver and Pamela,  Paul sighed and quietly closed the workroom door. He went up to the kitchen and started to rummage through the drawers and cupboards.

He passed up the knives, he passed up the marble rolling pin that Pamela kept above the stove, he even passed up the heavy meat tenderizer.

He guessed he knew what he wanted.

He opened up the junk drawer and fished out his hammer and after he heard the workroom door open and he was sure that Pamela had ushered her guest out of the house through the front door-

Paul met Pamela, the only child of Sam Agosti one time employee of Phillips Hardware store , and Paul brought the last of Sam’s forgotten hammers home.