“I’ve been alive forever, and I wrote the very first song,” is a lyric that Barry Manilow wrote, even though neither part of that verse is true. Barry Manilow is old, but he didn’t write the first song. Not at all. It’s a metaphor, see? He’s writing as a personification of music. But I digress, and the point is that humanity kind of abides, at least for now, and the things that make us human repeat, and we know it and can see it if we just look.

I saw a picture on social media yesterday, and it was a photo of an old, abandoned grocery store down in South Texas. You could see above the door where it still said “Piggly Wiggly.” And somebody commented that… isn’t it funny to think that there was a day when that Piggly Wiggly was new, and they had a Grand Opening and the people buzzed with excitement.

The Psalmist said that it shall all wax old like a garment, that is, the firmament and the foundation of the earth. And we can see it if we just look.

We were up before the sun, Danielle and I, drinking coffee, and she didn’t have to be at work for a few hours, so we set off on a downtown walk – the sky just starting to lighten and the air was cool but not cold.

Traffic sounds of the morning commute, and when we got to Fisk cars sped by, anxious, I reckon, to start the day or clock in or be on time for once.

There were election signs here and there, signs of the times, and the street sweeper was out, and as we crossed over to Main, walking through the old Hastings parking lot, it was lighter then and still cool.

We cut down Center, then past Shaw’s and then the Courthouse, and weeds – ever opportunistic and never weary – poked through the cracks. They’ll take it all over if we give up, and don’t you doubt it for one second. They’ve been here forever, or at least since the fall, and they probably wrote the first song.

Down Center past the gym and there just north of the Debusk building, that five-story old bank building I’ve written so much about, is a plain parking lot that used to be so much more.

That’s where I saw it.

Imprinted into the concrete you can see (See it in the picture there?) where the old tiles from the before-time were glued to the concrete. And over the decades of mopping and cleaning and the dirt from a thousand-thousand boots and shoes falling between cracks, the concrete got stained. The image of the tiles is still there.

There was a store here once. In the other picture, you can see the building. The white one, shiny and new looking. I could be wrong but if I recall what I read, it was once maybe a furniture store? Maybe. Next door, just north, was a General Store, a Five and Dime you might call it, but our building – the one that left the tile imprints, is the white one there and it was once attached to the Debusk building which still stands. Today, you can see the hole marks that run in a line angled inward compared to the street, that’s where the walls were, and the doors that people pushed through to walk to the counter and order, I don’t know, a sofa or a desk chair.

I’m pretty sure that, in an iteration even before that, back in 1909 or so, the building was a millinery, which sold women’s stuff… hats and silk ribbons and scarves and whatnot. Back then, the awning on the building came all the way out to the road, and telegraph poles, two of them, went right up through holes cut in the awning. By 1946, this building had changed, but the one attached just to the north was still the original.

Back in the now in the concrete of the plain parking lot, studying all that remains, you can see that the walls angled in on both sides, kind of a welcoming entryway directing you into the store.

Someone laid those tiles, carefully and diligently, and did so not thinking of me, nearly a century hence, staring down at it and thinking about him. Isn’t it fun to think that maybe the tiler was thinking of us? Maybe he was melancholy and prophetic and said to his wife that evening, “I laid down some tile that will one day be gone, but someone will be able to see that I was here once. I existed.”

Isn’t that fun to think?

Like Pompei or Machu Picchu or any other archeological site, the history here imprinted into the concrete tells a story and we can see it if we just look.

Maybe you know something about the building that was here?

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