Larry M. Coleman

This is the third week of a series that will span September: a series of Friday posts based on a selection of pictures I took myself during a walk down Route 66 in Tulsa in August, 2021.

Just an old sign. It could be anything. And the reason I like it is because it could be anything you want. The only thing it is now is something so unimportant and neglected that no one can even be bothered to take it down.

Or even to take a decent picture of it. This is just a cheap picture taken with my cell phone. The colors are completely out of balance: I couldn’t use night mode because of all the other lighting, but not using it came out like this. But even those are flaws I like. The color is dusty and smeared. The large balls of light are mismatched in color (one yellow, two blue), size, and location. The smear of light washes out completely the stars that were out on a beautiful, if still-above-90 degrees night.

Although this is Route 66, only two cars drive down it, but one of the things that detract from the loneliness of this sign is that there is too much going on in it. An interesting arc of a string of lights reflected on the body of the car in the foreground, the building in the background at the left is flooded with light. All of these steal away even the nobility of a long-lost purposefulness, the only thing left to this battered sign.

There was an ice cream stand in the town I grew up in. It closed when I was in middle school. The building remained for a few years, but eventually got knocked down to make room for additional parking for the bar across the street. The sign remained for years, still advertising ice cream that was no longer for sale. Over the years, it fell apart little by little, eventually losing the top cover, then the other, ending up looking almost exactly like this sign that haunts Route 66. The one from my old town is gone now, its rusty pole having bent in half in a violent windstorm that passed through a few years ago. Someone took a metal saw and cut it at the base. The concrete cube lasted a few years more, eventually removed for a redevelopment of that corner that still hasn’t happened.

What makes me saddest about that story is that I can’t remember the name of the old, long-vanished store. All those times driving by it, all those chances to look at it, and I didn’t pay any attention to it, either.

So I can make this sign anything I want it to be. It’s in Tulsa, so it’s surrounded by the Cherokee, Muskogee, and Osage that were here before it. That’s why in my mind, I’m going to make it a sign that used to sit in the parking lot of a medicine man. He sold herbs and potions and tokens and incantations that would give one the ability to look at things, give insight and luck and bring peace to an oversaturated mind or a troubled soul.

His parking lot was never full and often empty. Perhaps a single car or footprint here and there. But like his tribe, he remained. Until, that is, the cannabis dispensary opened across the street and gave the people what they wanted, if not what they needed.

This is my own little imagining, but it is only one little teaspoon dipped into the sea of stories it could be. Put your own toe in and come up with one of your own. It could be anything because the beauty in this sign is that it is nothing. Make it something again. Your something.