6 min readMar 15, 2026

I have a habit of befriending elderly people.

Mainly at Home Depot.

They aren’t monetizing their know-how, creating platforms, or speaking on longevity panels. Instead, they stand in aisle twelve holding a box cutter.

Plus, they are a library.

Not a single shelf. The entire twentieth-century archive.

The young employees are helpful. The older ones are revelatory.

Without exception, I end up in conversation with a man who looks retired from something substantial. Aerospace. Neurology. Education. Maybe all three. Maybe he is working for economic reasons. Or social ones. Or both.

Sure, I sought solutions, but realized years ago they weren’t sitting on a shelf; they walk the aisles in orange aprons, carrying their decades of lived experience, readily available for the asking.

The other day, I asked one gentleman about my occasional termite situation and the mildew in the dippy part of my washing machine. I relayed my homemade arsenal. Vinegar. Borax. Orange oil. Which I use for both these pesky issues.

He listened carefully and said, “That’s better than anything here. You did just fine.”

I relaxed, felt seen. I rarely feel seen, which is why I love coming here. I’m listened to, but more importantly, validated by someone who could be a genius — sagacious, to be sure.

Noble (his real name!) has clear eyes and steady hands. The posture of a man who does not panic.

No sparkle language. No fancy talk.

From termites and mold, we drifted to medicine, to the modern terror of eating food.

He told me he makes his own remedies. Threw out his prescriptions.

Magnesium for bone health.

Honey for his kidneys.

Bilberry extract for his eyesight.

“How old are you?” I had to ask.

“Eight-five”

“Get out!”

“Eat,” he said. “People are being told not to eat. Food will keep you alive. How is this complicated?”

I agree. I love to eat.

He spoke fondly of bread and pasta. He has a personal grievance with white rice. Too much sugar. Not worth the trouble.

And once the remedies door opened, the list kept going.

Noble leaned against a pallet of fertilizer and started counting on his fingers, the way people do when the information is stored somewhere deeper than memory.

Then:

Garlic for blood pressure levels.

Ginger for stomach upset.

Turmeric for inflammation.

Pickle juice or mustard for muscle cramps

Apple cider vinegar for digestion and steady blood sugar.

Onion syrup for colds and congestion.

We were instant friends. Not because I plan to replace all medical advice. But because there is something restorative about a person who has lived long enough to see fads come and go and still trusts basic things.

These are my people.

I launch into my own arsenal of common-sense living. Five-dollar Pond’s to clean my face, eight-dollar almond oil for plump skin.

My Clorox approach to everything from cleaning grout to cleaning my gums.

(Please DO NOT try this at home and do not drink it, but if you add a pinch of Clorox to a cup of warm water, with a dash of coconut mouthwash for taste, you will save thousands of dollars at the periodontist with a swirl and a spit. But that’s me. You can read more about it here: A clever chemist, Henry Drysdale Daken, saved hundreds of lives on the WW1 battlefield by pouring Clorox on the wounds of otherwise dying men. It kills bacteria. But I digress. I’m also rather possessive about my cleaning products.)

Noble, of course, knew about this.

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Again, it’s just common sense. I love common sense. We laugh about this. Why does it seem so rare these days?

We carry on. I learn about his three marriages, five children, a dozen grandkids…

We exchange pictures of our children. We talk about range-free child rearing.

“Let them run around like wildebeests,” he tells me. And I agree.

“And bonobos!” I shout, though I’m not quite sure what a bonobo is, but it’s fun to say.

Hardware stores might be the last places where strangers speak freely without concern over judgment.

Nobody is trying to win the conversation. It’s a community for the curious.

I tell Noble I live between two, perhaps three centuries. I would have done fine in a covered wagon, provided someone handed me a decent hammer, some salt pork, and a sack of flour. My great-grandmother raised ten children in a house she built herself from bricks and sticks. She funded the operation by making moonshine and selling it to the local sheriffs, which I consider both entrepreneurial and diplomatic.

That grit traveled down the line.

So when an elder tells me a simple rubber ring will fix my leaking shower head, I listen.

To wit: Recently, a fancy-truck plumber guy warned that my entire bathroom wall required demolition, the pipes reconfigured, and a full theatrical production. My Home Depot professor placed a small rubber washer in my hand and explained the choreography.

Unscrew. Detach. Replace. Tighten.

Eight dollars later, silence.

The kind of silence that makes you briefly suspicious of every professional estimate you have ever received.

There is nothing quite as satisfying as fixing a drip.

Sometimes the solution is small, circular, and patient.

Modern life is way too modern for me.

Give me the old-fashioned solution to any problem, really. Knotty problems are more complex than they seem. The overthinkers are killing themselves. But info and solutions are here. With the elders. It still lives in them.

YET

We warehouse them in facilities.

We sideline them in meetings.

We pretend innovation is a synonym for youth.

Meanwhile, the people who have already survived recessions, epidemics, starvation, world wars, homelessness, heartbreak, parenting, aging, and the collapse of entire cultures are standing quietly under fluorescent lights.

Happy to hand out working solutions for free.

The truth is that the elderly are a strategic resource.

Yet their experience is reframed as obsolescence.

This is not just unkind. It is economically foolish. At least to me.

And another benefit. My Home Depot buddies are easy-going. Happy. Living the dream. Nothing phases them. This is where we connect. I’m not one for mental complications, emotional distress over nothing, or hysteria over even less.

None of this goes on in Home Depot. It’s a mental spa.

Every time I leave, clutching the cheapest cleaning cloths in the store because, of course, those are the best, I feel gifted. Not just advised. Gifted.

There are cathedrals built of stone and stained glass. And then there is Home Depot, built of cinderblock and sandpaper. Both offer hope.

But only one sends you home with a rubber washer, a better story, and the calm certainty that most problems can be solved if you slow down and ask someone who has already fixed it before.

The automatic doors slide open. The smell of lumber and fertilizer drifts into the parking lot. Someone is loading drywall into a truck.

I go in for borax.

I leave with wisdom.