Ace Noble is a hardware store in my town, a big company that took over the struggling store and made it sizzle, even in our small town. Brian Carroll is the manager, and to me, he symbolizes the idea that even though chains and corporations can be impersonal and disconnected from people, they can also be very personal, welcoming and connected to their communities.

For me,the hardware store is Brian’s world. That’s what I call it.

Trained as an anthropologist, life has taken Brian on different twists and turns and led him to the hardware store. I don’t know how many times I have come running or whining to Brian for help – the lawn mower won’t start, I can’t unscrew the nozzle from the hose, I need a new latch for the gate, I can’t put the new fan together, the bathroom door just fell off.

Brian has the gift of seeming to be grateful for every request for help, as if he is waiting for you to come through the door. I tried to buy an axe to chop wood at the hardware store, he told me wouldn’t sell it to me unless Maria said it was okay. He seems to knew where every screw, bolt and told is.

You can ask  him the dumbest questions – and i do – and he listens carefully and explains it mercifully, as if I couldn’t possibly be expected to know how to turn a screw to the right. Okay, I am mechanically challenged.

Community is about being known and accepted, for better or worse. There are people here who like me and people who don’t, but there is no one I’ve yet met who can’t accept me. That has not always been the case for me.

Brian guided me into the strange world of my new grill, which I new use regularly, just like any outdoor guy. He laughs at me often, as Maria does, but never makes me feel dumb or small. And he is always happy to let me return any of the stupid and incorrect things I invariably buy.

I wanted to do a portrait of Brian because he is one of those people who makes a small town like mine work, and who grasps the power of community, even in a corporate chain with a monopoly – rarely a good thing for community in a small town. He keeps a jar of biscuits by the counter for Fate and Red, and hugs customers who are having a rough time.

He spends much of the day wandering the long aisles of the crammed hardware store, answering questions, quiding people, giving them tips. I wanted to catch him in the paint aisle.

My wife knows her way around a hardware store, she stomps up and down the aisles like any contractor would, looking by herself for the right screw. She never asks for help. I can’t find the lawnmowers without help.

I am not one of those men who are at home in hardware stores, for me it is like being dropped on Mars with aisles. I don’t know where anything is, what anything is, or what anything does. Brian and his staff have made me feel somehow at home in this alien word.

Brian is almost pained when I don’t bring the dogs in. Perhaps the key to community is in finding people who love people and letting them love and serve people. My curator has to approve all the photos, but I’m happy to include a portrait of Brian in my portrait show. “People Of Cambridge.” I’ll call it “Brian’s World.”