Route 66, Arizona, 1947

There's a poster on the wall at the Borders on NW Expressway, back behind the DVD section. It's a photo from Life Magazine by Andreas Feininger called Route 66, Arizona, 1947.

You can see it here.

This poster kind of pulled me back in time the first time I saw it. Or, more accurately, the first time I noticed it, because I probably walked past it 200 times before I actually saw it.

I have a story that goes with this poster.

You're driving along Route 66, on your way from one place to another – Oklahoma City to Los Angeles, maybe – and you come to this little town, and you realize you don't to go any farther.

You can just stop here. And you do.

There's a 'Help wanted' sign in a little grocery market. You take that job. You had another job, in an office, in a complex, wore a coat and tie every day, on the way up, solid future. You don't even call them to quit.

You don't call your girlfriend or your friends or your relatives, either. It's as if they were a dream you had.

So now you're a grocery clerk. And you find a house for rent, a little house with just one bedroom, close to the highway, maybe just off the right edge of that photo. You walk to work. You're at work early and you're off early, and in the afternoon, you go back to your little house and stretch out on the bed. The window is open and sometimes you hear the wind rustling through the few trees. A dog barks. An occasional car zooms through the highway junction. You drift in and out of sleep.

And this is your life. This is your world. You and the grocery store and your little house and the Texaco station.

Have a Pepsi.