Each year, I award a small scholarship in my name to a student at the University of Hartford. It’s part of the Alpha Sigma Lambda award for high academic achievement among “non-traditional” students. These students come to the University of Hartford with credits from programs they have begun and abandoned, after long working careers, putting children through college first, or simply resigned to never finishing their degree. The University program collects their credits, often in imaginative ways, and helps structure a degree program. These students are a pleasure to teach, as they bring life skills and long-deferred goals to their education.

We ask applicants for the Christine Beck Lissitzyn scholarship to write an essay about one problem they would like to see changed in the world and one small step they propose to take to help. This year’s winner wrote about rescuing dogs and volunteered to use her photography and communication skills to help rescue organizations better publicize their available dogs for rescue. Another student wrote about planting trees.

I can understand why students don’t write about the many problems in the world that feel overwhelming. Forty years ago, when my husband and I moved from Manhattan to West Hartford, Connecticut, there was no internet, no social media, no 24-hour news cycle bombarding us with wars, earthquakes, floods, starving children, imprisoned or tortured journalists, or a total gridlock in our political system. I imagine students today can’t imagine how they could do anything to help world hunger or end the war in Ukraine.

When we’d bought our house, childless and accustomed to the rhythms of life in Manhattan, we’d drive around looking for a restaurant open past 8pm. There were none in West Hartford. We finally found a steak house open until 9pm in neighboring Farmington. Accommodating to the life of a small town centered on raising families took some doing. West Hartford center, a two block square bordered by Main and Farmington Avenue, was years away from the destination town it has become, beacon to hordes of underage drinkers clogging up the bars that sprout like dandelions in our backyard. Now, there are eight restaurants, all open well past 10 pm. Now, you can buy kebabs, tacos, spanakopita or shushi.

Today not finding an open restaurant seems a laughable “problem” given the state of the world.

But I’ve been thinking about whether there is one small thing I could do to solve a world problem and what it might be. And oddly, that led me to thinking about hardware stores.

In the early 80s, small stores clustered in the two-block square that was West Hartford. There was a bookstore called The Bookworm, The Toy Chest, a children’s clothing store, a stationary store, and two jewelry stores—one a bit more high-end than the other, but peacefully coexisting, as in fact they still do today.

There were also two hardware stores, Colonial Hardware on LaSalle Street, and Pfaus, cattycornered on Farmington Avenue. Our favorite was Colonial, although I couldn’t have said why.

Maybe parking was easier. Each had that smell of sawdust on wide-pegged wooden floors, a whiff of oil and turpentine, the metallic cluster of screws and nails in sizes graduated in cubbyholes. You could buy lightbulbs, contact paper, get keys made, get a window shade cut to size. The owners—it seemed in those days that there was one older man in an apron with pockets assisted by a couple of eager teenaged boys, looked as if they were equally pleased if you bought a quarter’s worth of washers than a window fan or outdoor grill. When they said, “what can I help you with?” they listened attentively, as if their afternoon had brightened by chatting about the choices for about my home improvement project.

When Colonial Hardware left the center after 70 years in 1995, I transferred loyalties across the street to Pfaus. That old-timey smell still lingered in the other store, although eventually they added candles, kitchenware, waste baskets with hunting dogs or sailing ships to their offerings.Then Pfaus was bought out by Ace Hardware, now the only hardware store in town.

When our children came along, we’d spend an afternoon playing at the Toy Chest, big glass windows fronting on Farmington with stuffed animals, board games, toys arranged at eye level. With a big parking lot behind it, no metered parking in those days, we could wander through the aisles with no eye on the clock. My biggest worry was putting toys back on the shelf where the girls had grabbed them. My eldest spied a huge stuffed lion at the Toy Chest one year, declared she simply must have “Leo” for Christmas. We have it still, plopped on the guest room bed for when she visits with her little daughters.

The Toy Chest survived for 33 years, perhaps because as West Hartford has grown with young families, it’s as much a place to play as to buy. Downstairs were the pricey items—children’s furniture. Perhaps those items make enough profit to keep selling pencils and tiny action figures. It closed in January of 2023, when the second of its two prior owners retired.

Then there was the Book Worm, owned by two slightly dour-looking ladies, but always with an inviting window filled with books recently reviewed in The New York Times.

The store was nothing like the wonders of the Strand on Broadway in Manhattan, two floors of reading delights where I could spend an afternoon. Even then, back before Barnes and Noble and Borders, the Strand had armchairs and spots to plop to read a page or two or more. But I patronized The Book Worm because it was local, it was our bookstore. It closed too, victim of the big box book stores.

Parking is now expensive and hard to find in West Hartford. Even if I wanted to patronize Ace Hardware, I’d face that cost and inconvenience. But the real problem, the behemoth that keeps me from shopping in the center, is Amazon. It started out as just books. Why drive to Borders, I told myself, when they are a chain just like Amazon? It was just much easier to search for the book I’d just seen reviewed in Sunday’s Times, click a button, and start reading instantly on kindle or two days later if I had it mailed. The Book Worm was closed. I didn’t miss the dour ladies. Amazon was just so easy.

Taking a cue from the student essay for my scholarship, I’m going to make one small change. I’m going to buy books on thriftbooks.com (or get them from the library. Yes, I may have to wait. That’s part of the commitment.)

I don’t delude myself that Amazon will miss my book dollars, but I know the cost of all those free deliveries, cars and trucks zooming around the neighborhood, the exhaust spewed into the atmosphere, is part of a big, big problem.

But the hardware store, I confess, is what troubles me most. Recently, I bought a new shower head. I compared ten models online through Amazon, chose my favorite, and clicked the button. Even if Ace Hardware carried shower heads, there’s no way they would have the range of options available at Amazon.

I don’t delude myself that a shower head, a new faucet, an instant pot, or electric mixer will make or break Ace Hardware, itself part of a chain of hardware stores. But each time I click the Amazon button, I know I’m choosing easy over all those folks who show up at a store to serve their town. I know I am contributing to a monopoly that grows stronger by the day. I know Amazon is not the employer with an apron hiring teenaged boys who know their neighbors, call them out by name.

But most of all, I miss the smell, the smell of wooden floors and sawdust, the smell of working men, men like my grandfather, a farmer, the smell of stables, feed mills, tractor grease, and new plowed dirt. The men who worked at the hardware store remind me of my childhood, where there was no internet, no parking meters, no big box stores, and no Amazon. When value was measured by more than fast and cheap.

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Readers, here is your chance to respond to the scholarship essay question: what small change can you make today to help solve a world problem? I’m eager to hear from you.