Wait Here While I Get My Gun

You are reading the words of a man who owns grease guns. They're like bicycle pumps, with a long handle that depresses a hydraulic plunger, and a floppy nozzle about yea long extending from a metallic barrel holding a tube of, well, grease.

I guess the guy who had our house before us worked on old tractors a lot - Allis Chalmers or Massey Ferguson, or Duncan Hines for all I know. And when he moved out he left me a couple of grease guns - to go with the two dozen paint cans and plastic Christmas lawn ornaments in the basement - plus an extra refill tube in case I ran out.

I don't know how I'll ever run out of this stuff. I don't even know where he got it. It's bright red for crying out loud, and goopy in a way I have difficulty describing. Imagine blobs of Elmer's glue, red globs mind you, but stickier and whipped with Crisco to make 'em shiny. This is why I don't shop at tractor supply warehouses.

But guess what? My garage door has been sticking on the downstroke lately, and a few minutes with a stepladder and my grease gun put an end to it right away. A dab here and there on the tracks, one or two in some of the dryer-looking wheel bearings, and that sucker g-l-i-d-e-s down to its resting position.

It's a thing of beauty, really. Gross, gloppy, fluidly-moving-through-its-workings-like-a-precision-piece-of-machinery-instead-of-a-decrepit-contraption-from-the-Eisenhower-era beauty. And I love it. The hardest part was hanging the gun back on its peg, fighting the urge to squirt anything that moves and could probably move a little bit better.