Each time I pass through the automatic sliding doors of an immense hardware warehouse, the gust of stale warm air rustles my hair to remind me: No other place is as communal or as incomplete on a weeknight.

The mood strikes me first in the parking lot, where only the slightest electric hum can be distinguished under the pale fluorescence of tall lampposts. Only a few insects dare challenge the silence with their chirps and buzzes and as I stride toward the entrance, I watch their tiny silhouettes hover in front of the tremendous backlit letters hanging above, spelling out the name of the place minus an "M" that has long been burned out.

I frequently find myself entering these vast spaces in such a manner, usually on a mission with or for my father. His projects throughout the years have generally focused on what I consider to be the inane and what he considers the essential. We differ on this minor stance, but having been raised to eat every last pea and to mow the lawn in a meticulous circuit so as to avoid grass clumping, how can I neglect my duty as willing hardware apprentice?

Thus, I have been to every Lowes and Home Depot in the tri-state area. I have spent three hours watching my father examine a tube of caulk. I have lugged enough tar and Quikrete to pave Wisconsin and I have discovered that hardware stores on weeknights are ghost towns compared to their alter egos on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. Full of mostly lone men in search of peace and quiet as much as any bracket or screw, there is an unspoken communion from after dinner until close.

There is something oddly solemn about the way men in worn John Deere hats peruse driveway sealant on Thursday evenings, as if they were choosing which would be penciled in to receive the pickup truck in their will. Valiant smirks surface above slackened ties when the exact swivel casters needed are found. Sometimes the bags under their eyes are like pillows, each man having worked all day without the chance to even yawn. There is no yawning, however, not in a warehouse.

Nothing in a hardware warehouse is whole, nothing complete. This is why a full yawn could never escape. Everything is scheduled to be added, mixed, glued, nailed into place. The building itself screams work-in-progress, just a giant box. Slab concrete floor, vapor barrier exposed ceilings, stock lighting and a simple chain link fence enclosing the garden section. One could not live in this place despite the fact that it supplies all the necessary ingredients for building a home.

As long as I can remember, this is the way it has been. In my father's mind, trips to the hardware warehouse involve a deep concern for the protection of investments, namely his home and all things associated. He shares this sentiment with the men around him and from this collective point of view stems the belief that familial love can indeed be manifested in the upkeep of shared spaces and communal items. If a wooden deck is treated and sealed in the spring for instance, there will be no splinters in the tender feet of children in the summer, making backyard barbeques all the more enjoyable for everyone.

In my mind, these trips are less pragmatic and seem only to add color to my growing feeling of inadequacy. I was never much for paying attention to my father's lectures on grout properties and fiberglass insulation. It all seemed a bit foolish to me, to obsess over the intricacies of pipe soldering with so much else going on in the world. Nonetheless, I have come to understand that the forces that bind a son to a father are strong and more importantly, overriding. No matter how foolish my father's concerns may seem, I will always place my qualms aside and travel to the warehouse on my Tuesday and Thursday nights.

There an eerie feeling brews within me as I walk down aisles upon aisles of items for the kitchen, the bedroom, the places where I eat and sleep. I stop in the mock kitchen set-ups and examine the stylized cabinet pulls, shaped like forks and spoons. I cannot help but envision them elsewhere, on white wooden drawers in tropical locations, in houses of soft pinks and corals, with sofa cushions upholstered in fish-patterned fabric, jade green plaster lamps shaped like seashells; places so unlike the warehouse, places with a view of a turquoise sea. I do this for many other items, the bathtubs, the jigsaws, each ending up in a complete place with purpose and momentum. I do this and I visit whole buildings that contain items not so out of context. I do this and then I return to the reality of the warehouse.

Of course the paint value center is empty on these weeknights, lacking its usual Saturday afternoon newlywed couple, giving me another chance to imagine as I visualize them looking at chip samples. She is wearing her new hiking boots, the ones yet to be scuffed. What color will their new kitchen be: Honeydew…Shire Green…Mermaid Isle…Havana Cream? He does not seem to care much, nodding slowly as she flips through the rainbow. The honeymoon is gone and the show has begun and he cannot keep his eyes off the laser level on sale for $49.99 until….Honeydew it is. Years later he will be a weeknight patron like my father.

As my eyes trace the steps of the imagined couple toward the exit, I notice Leonard, who is standing, less than stoic, at the entrance to the garden center. Humidity billows moist and heavy behind him and his crisp red apron. Leonard's name tag indicates that he is there to help discuss keeping lawns perfectly green and his back-brace suggests that he might heft fifty pound fertilizer bags into a landscaping truck. Unfortunately, as soon as Leonard picks at the scab on his nose I realize he probably is not very good at either. He is just a kid, the type of employee my father has taught me to avoid in the search for assistance. Rather, I should ask "HELLO MY NAME IS: PETE" for help instead, his apron splotched and ripped with age and knowledge.

Men like Pete fit more convincingly into this environment than I ever will, sharing the space willingly with the faux-know-it-alls who come seeking advice without wanting to ask for it; unready to expose their status as sheetrock neophytes. All of them hoist tools and implements, simulating drywall installation techniques and belt-sanding methods, reveling in the majesty of their own technical ability. They scrawl numbers and figures on tiny yellow lined pads with the nubs of ancient work bench Ticonderogas. Their hats often hint at their areas of expertise: Conklin & Sons Plumbing, Radford Electric, Smith Siding and Gutter. Other men are clad in business attire, fresh from the office, itching to throw on some mesh shorts, but sacrificing comfort for the solace of Aisle 14. They band together in this place, the well-versed and the rookies, all characters in a mysterious documentary, each lamenting the hour of reckoning, the call for last shoppers to report to registers for check-out. They begin their sad slow waltz hesitantly, finally having to decide which gauge wire really will do the trick.

They hover slowly under the track lighting, gliding like specters across the cool, cracked concrete floors. As LCD screens on clocks readjust their neon line segments to form a 9, a 4, and a 5, it becomes impossible to imagine that children in houses are collectively laying their heads on soft pillows, pulling down shades and drifting to sleep under down comforters. In warehouses, sleep is a concept similar to yawns, yet to be constructed, fought off at all costs. Sleep is still some wire (Aisle 3), a shade (Aisle 9), a socket (Aisle 14), and a switch (Aisle 3 again). Sleep is still ten easy steps away from being whole, complete, real. It would prevent patrons entirely from being able to embrace their role in the warehouse, as important entities, with specific agendas and projects to attend even on Friday nights. Despite all this, however, each man leaves at home a reality entirely unknown to his weeknight counterparts.

I know my father's reality of course, as I watch him standing, examining a set of drill bits. If I was not his son, I do not know what I would think of him in his ruddy blue sweatpants. He lost his reading glasses, the ones he used to read the labels and mixing procedures on the back of plastic bottles and burlap sacks. He wears my mother's glasses instead. They rest sloppily on his nose, a trace of secretary. From a distance he may look foolish, so enthralled in the twenty bit set with his ghost white ankles ending in a pair of weatherworn Topsiders. He may look foolish, but he is foolish and concerned. Foolish and only a short drive away from home and his bed, where sleep may become reality and dreams might place him inside the only house I will ever be capable of building, a house shaded in soft pinks and corals, constructed without the hammering of a single nail.