Taking time for weighty matters

A man came into the wine and cheese shop last week. From his age and dress, I knew he wasn't a customer or vendor.

Customers are informal and look at merchandise, not sales help. Vendors carry fancy briefcases and wear suits. This man, while not sloppy, didn't have to impress anyone.

He asked for the owner. I retrieved him promptly. A salutation, a handshake, an introduction. He was from the local Department of Weights and Measures. This is the sort of man who has lived his whole life in one town and whom everyone remembers going way back. Not me; I'm a newcomer, a New Englander for only 10 years.

He chatted with the boss for a moment about local sports, then asked if we had any scales. We did. It is a modern digital one for weighing cheese, the kind that gives weights down to the hundredth of a pound and calculates prices that it spits out on a bit of tape with a bar code, all up-to-date and streamlined.

The inspector excused himself for a moment to get his "things." These consisted of three small iron cubes and a spiral notebook, the sort students used to carry before they went high-tech and did everything on laptops.

Then, with deliberation, he placed each cube on the scale, which dutifully read out their correct weights: 1.0, 2.0, 4.0. No one expected otherwise, but there was still something strange in those even zeros.

In the real world of cutting off blocks of cheese and weighing them, nothing is ever that perfect. A customer asks for half a pound and gets .48 or .53 -- pretty good, and close enough, but those metal cubes are meant to be exact. They were forged and tested with that in mind.

The man then made an entry in his notebook, took out a red sticker that serves as an official seal, signed and dated it, put it on the back of the scale, shook the boss's hand again, and left.

It had the feeling of a ceremony, as though in the course of an ordinary day, I, a clerk in a gourmet store, had witnessed an ancient rite that had lost its meaning except in its connection with the generations that had all engaged in the same. This was like standing, no matter what one's politics, when the judge enters the courtroom, or removing one's hat when the national anthem is played.

It seems trivial, all for show, a bit of paperwork, bureaucracy, left over from some bygone era. Why a special inspector, on top of the others, to deal with the accuracy of scales? To prevent dishonesty, yes, but I saw something more in it.

An agreement to have national standards of weights and measures was written into the Magna Carta of 13th-century Britain, though the concept is older. "Let there be one measure of wine throughout our kingdom and one measure of ale . . ." Without uniform standards, commerce could take place only on a local level. There was no way to sell at a distance if each community had its own. If an argument broke out between seller and buyer, a third party could never determine who was cheating whom to resolve the dispute.

Closer to home, the power to "fix the Standard of Weights and Measures" is given to Congress in our Constitution. This is important stuff.

I never learned the name of the man from the Department of Weights and Measures nor saw him again, but I'm grateful for the chance to have been a spectator to that tiny ritual, mute testimony that we're all part of something bigger in the grand scheme of civilization, in which commerce is possible and being exact matters.

Julia Altshuler lives in Marlborough.

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