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2 3 R C R E S C E N T W R E N C H R O B E R T W R I G L E Y The pin, the knurl, the shank, the jaws, the seat and beveled saddle. Drop-forged, cold-forged – I have thirty-one, so far, and haven’t checked the kits in the car or truck. A rainy Sunday in mud season, I’m supposed to be cleaning out the garage but have gotten hung up on this senseless census of two-and-a-half-dozen-and-more crescent wrenches. I’ve got more crescent wrenches than I need, to say nothing of the herd or horde of box-end, open-end, and combinations in metric and standard sizes, hardly any of which I ever use, what with all the crescents, also called adjustable spanners. Monkey, spud, and allen too, each of which does or undoes fasteners of every style and manner. Always turn a crescent wrench’s adjustable jaw in the direction of the nut’s rotation, never use a crescent on a half-rounded nut. How I know such strictures I do not know, though I know I haven’t always done so and don’t know anyone who always has. Thus, like others, I have broken one that’s still in the tool box, a now useless hunk of drop-forged steel I not only cannot bear to look at but also cannot cast away, and thereby deprive it of the fellowship of its fellow wrenches at least. It lies there with its bent pin and wide-open, cock-eyed jaws distended, 2 4 Y counted in the census but dead as half the voters in old-time Chicago machine politics. Beautifully machined, it was, but not so beautifully as my favorite, this crescent from the Crescent Tool Company, its high grade eponymous AT18CV eight-inch, with cushioned grip and black phosphate finish. It would, says the company, survive the fire that burns my house to the ground, though the cushioned grip would vanish into smoke. I remember going with a friend to comb the ruins of his place gone up in a forest fire. Not much there. Great nuggets of molten steel where the refrigerator and range fell through the floor, the woodstove with its antler door handle burned away. Also a weird and wonderful meteorite all the silverware in the dishwasher fused into, tines of a few forks drooped down, a serving spoon curled around a seemingly unscathed butter knife. He ran it through the dishwasher in the rental then sat it on the mantel of the new place he built. But that day, in the ruins of his garage, in his blackened massive, once-red Craftsman tool chest, all the plastic-handled screwdrivers were melted to a dozen-legged Phillips and Standard starfish, and in the big bottom drawer we had to bludgeon open with a sledgehammer, the great array of wrenches. A few slumped and brittle that broke when we rapped them on the foundation wall, but there, beneath them all, shielded perhaps by the others atop it, a crescent made by the Snap-On Tool Company, its knurl still spinnable, its pin in need of lubricant but otherwise unharmed: but for the head of his burned-out splitting maul, the great woodstove, and the meteorite of flatware, it was the only salvageable item we found in our spelunking. He hung the wrench in the living room of the new house, taking it down now and then 2 5 R to twist some nearby nut o√ or on its bolt, conversation-piece and memento of the conflagration, like the meteor, beautiful, but still useful too. And by some miracle of wind and fuel, a page of one of his old cheesecake shop calendars also survived, scorched around the edges. The model’s head was burned o√, but clutched between her bikini-topped breasts the very wrench he’d hung on the wall, the framed calendar picture mounted next to it. He was a bachelor, of course. It might have been that day my otherwise unexplainable love or devotion to crescent wrenches was born...

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