I was out running my usual route not too long ago and as I passed by the stop sign, I noticed how many nails, staples, tacks, and tape had been stuck into it over the years. It was covered in a virtual fuzz of fasteners. I've run by this particular sign at least a hundred times in the last two years, and driven by it probably three or four times that. Thoreau talks about awakening and how men live lives where they are asleep to the things around them. It's at a moment like this that I realize how asleep I am so much of the time.
I was thinking about how each of these bits of metal or plastic represent a story. Most of these stories are commonplace things - lost cats, lost dogs, yard sales, moving sales, concerts, after school karate classes, baseball camps, open houses. But when you look at the sheer number, it's like the climactic end of an opera - the curtain is coming down - the fat lady with the horned helmet and spear is singing something in German, she is surrounded by a Greek chorus reminding us not to think we can cheat fate, and off to one side is a man in a half mask with his arm around two barbers - one from Seville, the other from Fleet Street. Perhaps as we watch, there is an old Italian Don rising up from a hole in the floorboards preparing to exact his otherworldy revenge. It's a caucophony of many lives' small moments reaching out to us for a moment of our time - sometimes in professionally printed block letters on thin guage plastic signs, but more often it's a message in marker on posterboard. "I have something to say."
What message would you post on the existential stop sign at the cross roads?
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