The Weekly Shriek -- Hammers

In a long ago class, I was intrigued by a game the teacher wanted to play.

"In the next sixty seconds, write down all the uses for a hammer," she said while eying her watch. She reminded me of Dolly Parton with her perky big hair. "Ready? Okay. Now."

I glanced around. A fellow next to me licked the lead of his pencil and started on his list. What an eager beaver! Just like Barney Fife! I looked behind me. Everyone was already busy.

"A hammer?" I asked.

"You are wasting time." Dolly, horrified by my lack of enthusiasm for this very important exercise, tapped the table in front of me with her long nails.

Hmmm. A hammer. I sketched a ball peen on my notebook. I remembered my dad tapping a flat piece of tin with one. I don't remember why though. "Making dents?" That didn't seem right.

The roar of scratching pencils filled my ears. A pretty girl who looked like Sylvia Plath wrote down one item, folded her paper and stared out the window. The second hand rounded six and started back up toward twelve. I scribbled down something from an old song at the last moment.

"Time's up." Dolly leaned back against her desk with her arms folded.

People stopped writing and looked up expectantly.

"Anyone with more than ten uses for a hammer?"

A young man who looked a lot like Elvis raised his hand.

"How many?" Dolly rewarded him with a smile."Twenty-eight," he said.

"I can't beat that." Barney threw down his pencil.

"Anyone else with more?" Dolly asked.

We all looked at each other. Sylvia shrugged.

"Okay, let's hear them," Dolly said to Elvis.

"Banging, beating, smashing, nailing, tacking, throwing," Elvis reeled off.

Throwing? I made a mental note to stay more than a hammer's throw away from Elvis.

"Tapping, knocking, bending, slamming," he continued. "Prying, propping, hooking, holding."

"I don't think holding counts," a woman with Tammy Faye eyelashes interrupted.

"Why not?" Elvis countered. "She didn't say we couldn't hold it."

"Who buys a hammer just to hold it?"

"Maybe you would buy a hammer for a dummy to hold." Barney stuck the eraser of his pencil in his ear. "Like if you owned a hardware store and you wanted to show off the wares?"

We stared at him for a while.

"I don't think you'd buy a hammer if you want to prop something up either." Tammy Faye folded her arms over her chest.

"Will you just get on with it?" Barney tapped his pencil on the desk.

"I think propping works," Dolly said. "Like to prop open a sliding glass door."

"Wouldn't you just go buy a doorstop, for heaven's sake?" Tammy Faye took Barney's pencil away from him and tucked it into her purse.

"Go on," Dolly nodded at Elvis."Measuring, balancing, poking, scratching, weighting."

"What do you mean weighting?" Tammy Faye said. "What's balancing got to do with a hammer?"

Tammy Faye was too literal for my tastes.

"Weighting works for me," Sylvia said.

"I had that one too." Barney held up his paper so we could all see what he'd written. "Paper weighting."

"What's wrong with those little glass balls with snow inside them for weighting paper?" Tammy Faye sniffed.

"There's nothing wrong with them. We're just saying you can use a hammer to hold down paper too." Barney said. "You know, to keep it from blowing away?"

I didn't have any trouble visualizing a ream of paper held down by a mallet - and of course, who among us hasn't seen sea lions balancing hammers on their noses?

Elvis wasn't through. "There are ice hammers, rip hammers and claw hammers."

I was getting pretty tired of hammers by this point.

"If you have two hammers you can do even more," Elvis turned over his paper and perused the back.

"Like what?" I asked just to be nice to him because he did remind me of Elvis, after all.

"You can't use two hammers." Tammy Faye insisted. "That's against the rules."

"What rules?" Sylvia asked. "The fact that there were no rules is what makes this such an interesting philosophical discussion."

"You can use them for bookends or napkin holders or seat savers," Elvis rambled on.

"Seat savers?" Tammy Faye and Elvis would never see eye to eye.

"Yeah, you know. Like at the movies? Did you ever see anyone who would sit on a hammer? Even if they do, they'll eventually get up and move." None of us could argue with Barney's logic.

"Any more?" Dolly broke our stunned silence.

"There ain't no more ways," Barney answered. "He's covered them all."

"He's listed things for hammers that don't' even exist." Tammy agreed.

"Is that all then?" Dolly asked Elvis.

"No, ma'am. I got three more."

"Proceed then." Dolly didn't sound like the real Dolly except when she hit the high notes after Barney spilled his ice tea in her lap.

"You can hammer-on with your guitar, you can get hammered when you drink and you can hammer the other team when you play football." Elvis scratched his chin. " - and that's about all you can do with hammers."

What can I say? This guy was a hammering fool who liked Forrest Gump.

"What about you, Sylvia?"

Sylvia jumped. "What about me?"

"Did you come up with a different way to use a hammer?"

"Only one," Sylvia mumbled and ducked her head.

"Share with us," Dolly laid a hand on Sylvia's shoulder.

"I think I'd use a hammer as a metaphor."

"I'm pretty sure that's against the rules too," Tammy Faye said.

"What about you, Joyce?" Dolly asked.

"I only wrote down one thing. I'd rather be a hammer than a nail. It's a song"

"It's a cliche," Sylvia pointed out.

She was such a stickler.