Time

Time

Walker Evans, Reedsville, 1936


When you go to visit my grandparents, you pass right through this corner. It's a four-way stop. In 1936, my Grandpa was 20 years old. He used to hang out with his friends in front of that gas station drinking cold pop. I have often looked at this picture and imagined Walker Evans asking Grandpa and his buddies to move out of the way so he could take the picture. I pulled this out today because my Grandpa passed away last night.

If I squint really hard when I look at the photo, I can see my Grandpa sitting on the bench under the overhang. He's sitting with one foot up on the bench and his knee pressed up under his chin -- his favorite "hanging out" pose. He's got a bottle of Coke in one hand and a cigarette in another. (Although he gave up smoking cold turkey twenty years ago after a heart attack.)

When I was growing up, Grandpa was still hanging out at this very gas station. He'd take me to meet all his friends and buy me some bubble gum and a pop.

You may think he didn't do very much... always hanging out on that corner. But that's where you're wrong. Grandpa had a long and wonderful life. He met, and even danced with Eleanor Roosevelt. He met Franklin, too. He owned and operated a cement block factory and supplied almost all the cement blocks found in Preston County. He met and married my Grandma when she was just 16 years old -- the beginning of happy, sixty-six year union. A few years later, they had my mom and he took on the role of father.

I know exactly where that corner is. I've been there too many times to count. But that picture is gone. Those buildings were torn down a long time ago. A few years back a lawyer built a log cabin where the gas station was. She uses it for her office. The white building was torn down and a post office put in it's place. The only thing that remains is the telephone pole.

I feel like that pole... standing in the middle of traffic and life. Everything changing, moving, dying, and being born. The changes are so small and so slow with the passage of time you almost don't notice it. But then one day it hits you... nothing is the same. It's familiar and yet oddly different and uncomfortable in it's strangeness.