An old country store!
You walk in the door and there is an old hand cranked telephone on the wall, as if ready to take a call as it once did when there were party lines and all anyone ever had to do to know the news was pick up the line and listen in. There is a stuffed deer’s head over the old fireplace even though, in August, there is no fire to be seen. The wood is, however, stacked neatly in the fire pit as if ready to ignite as the first hint of the frost being on the pumpkin. There are advertisements on every wall depicting products that have mainly faded from the scene many years before as the course of corporate progress has swept them from store shelves long ago.
But there are people there who can remember many of the products advertised if they only took the time to think about it. Perhaps they have stopped thinking about it long, long ago. Progress marches on and the creative destruction that is and has always been modern America in its continual flow courses on through the nations life’s blood--the making of money and the provision of something worth having in a changing world that its older ones can cling to as more and more change comes hurtling at them at sometimes breakneck speeds.
But, then, there are the younger ones there too. They make new memories with those who will become nothing but memories all too soon. It is the way of life and, in some ways, it always will be so. There will be those who care and those who never take the time to until they might wake up some day and find themselves staring at the next generation through the eyes of one now long gone from the scene. The old store has ancient photographs of people who stare down at them with expressions that seem so formal, befitting a time when taking or sitting for a portrait was a really big deal. There are no smiles there perhaps befitting a time when there might not have been that much to smile about. Or, perhaps, they just wanted to put their best face forward for eternity to gaze down upon.
We remember visiting a home of a family once that had boxes full of old photographs dating from times before the civil war. We asked who they were and the son who was a friend of ours had no real earthy idea who his ancestors were even though they were visible for all to see. Such is the passing scene as those who sat for those likenesses had just as well been anonymous to the current generation, as if they had never birthed at all. Like a case of collective Alzheimer’s, the eyes stared out at people who would look at them but there were no memories attached at all. A few of the photographs on the old country store wall did have some historical significant but only to the specialist who study a rapidly vanishing history that may some day be entirely gone itself. And there are those who would like to see that so, casting us back into a new collective dark age where there is no future and there is no past. Just worker ants or bees in a hive doing the collective business for the queen. They are born, they work, and they die and are swept away by those who come in their stead who know nothing better than to do what they are told or what comes instinctively to mind.
When one steps out into a dark and starry night, if one cares to look up one can see light coming from places who, long ago quit broadcasting it out into the universe. And one day it will be so with the collective us. Our light will outlive us and perhaps, as a neon light continues to work after what it advertised no longer exists, that is as it might be.
IOVHO,
Regards,
Joe
To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.
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