Struggle
It's Good For You
Title my photo Struggle. Caption it: Dreams die along the back roads. First two sentences: Can’t even sit in a chair and look forward to better days. Stuck in reverse.
A man could write 100 stories about this place. Here’s one of ’em.
Many old buildings suffer a long life of failure and repurposing. I see it all the time. An old grocery store becomes a hair salon. An old hair salon becomes a grocery store. Why I knew of a store where a man could get a haircut while they put new tires on his car. It survived, one of the few.
I ride past businesses doomed from the start. No one in their right mind would put up a business where some dreamer did. I’m sure they blamed their demise on bad luck, but some landed on their feet because not all bad luck is bad. “You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”
Cormac McCarthy said that. Need an example? The flu keeps you from making a road trip with the boys. Your buddies hydroplane into a tree. One of ’em dies. But let’s not be so grim. There’s a silver lining along the edge of that rusting tin.
