Free 600 Hours of Edward by Craig Lancaster Page A

me. My parents gave it to me for Christmas in 2002. I took it out once and nearly got run over by a car on Lewis Avenue. It has been down in the basement since.
    I know the big back wheels on my mulching mower, which is out in the garage, will work. Taking them will render the mower useless, but I won’t need to worry about that until next spring.
    I’m going to need some lumber and some hardware—bolts and nuts and such—and some paint and some lacquer and some other things, too. I need to write my inventory down and take some measurements. Home Depot will be open in two hours and forty-three minutes.
    – • –
    My idea—for now, I am going to call it “The Big Project”—is one of the best that I have had in a while. I used to have a lot of big ideas, and I have never made any secret of the fact that I enjoy new projects, but many of them never came to fruition. (I love the word “fruition.”) It’s not that I couldn’t do them; it’s that they often collided with my other, more established projects, like watching
Dragnet
every night.
    I am confident, however, that The Big Project can get finished. It will require close attention not only to the fundamentals of the project itself but also to the clock.
    My idea has come on the day that the Dallas Cowboys play football.
    – • –
    Today’s trip to the Home Depot store in the West End of Billings goes so much better than the one Tuesday I can hardly believe it. But it’s a fact, and I trust facts.
    This has happened for a couple of reasons. First, I know exactly what I need and exactly where to get it, so there is no need to seek out potentially unhelpful store employees. Second, there are no choices involved—even with the spray paint. I can see inmy mind exactly what color The Big Project will be, and so I simply grab the appropriate cans and put them in the cart.
    As I wheel the heavily laden cart to the front of the store, I see that Home Depot even has self-checkout stands. If I kept data on such things, this might be the best day ever. Until today, however, it never occurred to me that the days were worth rating.
    – • –
    The total bill at Home Depot comes to $221.95. This sounds like the sort of cost you might hear on a late-night TV commercial, but in Montana, it’s common. Montana has no sales tax, which is something that most of its residents seem to appreciate. My father, as a Yellowstone County commissioner, is not so ebullient about it. (I love the word “ebullient.”) My father often bemoans the fact that the county doesn’t extract more money out of tourists by imposing a sales tax on them. He even led an unsuccessful charge against the state legislature to get it to empower individual counties to impose sales taxes as they please. An editorial in the
Billings Herald-Gleaner
criticized my father over this and said, “In his zeal to tax visitors to Montana, Commissioner Ted Stanton apparently fails to realize that he would also be soaking the many thousands of people who live here and pay his salary.” My father did not talk to anybody from the
Billings Herald-Gleaner
for several months after that.
    Here’s something else that my father will not be happy about: a bill for $221.95. He will get it next month. I will surely hear about it thereafter—perhaps even from his lawyer.
    – • –
    I arrive home at 9:23 a.m. The Dallas Cowboys will play in an hour and thirty-seven minutes against the St. Louis Rams. I am nervous about this game. The Cowboys’ best player, quarterback Tony Romo, is not going to play because he has a broken finger. The Cowboys ought to be able to win without Tony Romo because the St. Louis Rams are terrible, but I am still nervous.
    You are probably wondering why I am a Dallas Cowboys fan. I will tell you. First, the Dallas Cowboys are “America’s Team.” People call them this all the time. I don’t think America took a vote on it—and there are probably a lot of people in America who don’t even