Ghost In The Graveyard

With steady pressure applied to the brake pedal the car decelerated smoothly, slower and slower, losing momentum until it came to a complete stop. The engine purred a quiet idle beneath the red glow of the traffic signal. Steve looked up at the wire from which the light hung and the dingy yellow housing encasing the signal itself and wondered if they were the same ones he sat beneath so many times back in the nineteen seventies. He hoped they were - but figured they probably weren't. He cast his eyes around the old suburban intersection and found it largely unchanged. Straddling the corner on the left sat a two-story, dark brown, brick building Steve remembered well.  Forty years ago it had been a thriving little neighborhood market called Linneman’s. Even back then it had been an anachronism. Its wooden plank floors and mechanical cash register had already rendered more than half-a-century of service by the time Steve was old enough to walk there and buy a pop.  Compared to the modern convenience stores that eventually ran it out of business, it was tiny and crowded and limited in its assortment of goods. It carried cigarettes, beer, pop, chips and candy, a few canned goods, bread and milk. Its compact little meat counter housed a meager selection of popular luncheon meats and cheeses. Patrons entered through a screen door on the front that squeaked when it opened and banged shut when it closed. Like the majority of houses in Price Hill during the era, Linneman’s did not have central air conditioning, though it did have a small window unit cooling the back storeroom. During the months of summer swelter, temperatures in the store often crested above the one hundred degree mark, according to the ancient Seven-Up mercury thermometer mounted on the wall.  A small black metal fan, the old fashioned heavy kind enshrouded by a thick black grill, drew air out from the cooler back room into the front - but offered more by way of gesture than relief. Customers seldom dallied in the store more than a few minutes – motivated by discomfort and a desire to escape the real danger of heat stroke. The fan was there mainly to keep Tom, the cashier, from overheating.  Steve smiled as he remembered Tom. From the time he first entered the store as a young kid – to the time he moved away from Price Hill as a young adult, the cash register had always been manned by Tom. Like the store itself, Tom was a living connection to decades past. He looked like he had been preserved in a time capsule sealed back in the nineteen fifties. He was tall and slender, with short, wavy brown hair and thick, black Buddy Holly eyeglasses. Though he was at least fifteen years older than Steve, he had a baby face that belied any suggestion of fully matured adulthood. He wore plaid, button down shirts, long sleeve in winter and short sleeve in summer, solid-color work pants and penny loafer shoes. Tom had an honest smile and a warm greeting for everyone who entered the store. If you were returning pop bottles for the deposit, Tom would write down the number of bottles on a note pad, grab them off the counter and drop them in the back room. He was nice and polite and he knew all his customers because they all lived in the neighborhood. Most of them walked to Linneman’s several times per week to make casual purchases. Kids would come in and buy a pop and a candy bar and linger on the front stoop watching traffic go by. Tom didn’t mind as long as you sat off to the side, so as not to block the entrance. Steve smiled as all the memories greeted him. He wished he could pull over now, buy a pop and sit on the stoop. His pleasant daydreaming ended when he saw what had become of the place. Time had not been kind to the now-vacant building. The front entrance was boarded up and, judging by the weathered condition of the boards, had been for some time. Dissolute street artists had used cans of spray paint to display their suburban angst on the exterior of the store – as had street gangs marking their territory. Weeds filled the cracks in the sidewalks and the small patch of lawn in the rear of the building. Linneman’s was gone and would be preserved only in the memories of the humble, working class families living within the narrow swath of its influence while it was still a going concern. There had been no funeral, no recognition of the essential defining role it played in the history of the neighborhood, no eulogy celebrating how it had added local color and charm to the lives of Price Hill-ians lucky enough to have numbered among its patrons. Now the abandoned building stood as a ghostly monument and cautionary reminder that nothing lasts forever. It suddenly occurred to Steve that seemingly mundane things, like a small corner market opening its doors every morning, become profound when no longer available to us. Once gone, they stay gone, lost in the parade of incremental casualties wrought by time and circumstance. They cross over into the realm of memory where we can shape them to suit our needs and purposes. The light turned green and the car slid slowly by in silent reverence.