Signals turning

A little past the boundary of Harrison’s subdivision operated little coffee shop with a very little market inside. Harrison went there, usually, for bananas. Harrison lived a pretty boring sort of life so the need for a caffeine pick-up did not come up for him much. He liked bananas, though.

Harrison would not have thought much about the coffee shop except that he started to develop a thing for movies. He went to movies a lot, suddenly. It started with 50 First Dates and continued steadily from there. Something about being in the theater really appealed to him in a way that it had not in the previous decades of his life. So he took it up.

He would drive back late in the evening by this coffee shop. The building looked sort of like an old fashioned gas station, complete with the big awning running all around it so that customers could park their cars and be out of the rain in a millisecond. It had a fair sized space out front that it used for picnic tables. It also put up a sign that said “OPEN NOW!” Only, they never took it down. Harrison would drive home a little before midnight and the whole place would be totally dark but it would still say “OPEN NOW!” out front.

First, he tried to write them a letter. He wrote a simple postcard that said, “Are you aware that you never take down your ‘OPEN NOW!’ sign out front, so that it looks like you are open to passers by, even when you’re not. I can’t imagine this is very good for business.” He didn’t want to sign it but it was such a low maintenance letter that he felt like an idiot not signing it. He really, really did not want to sign it, though. What if they tried to call him? God. Even if they wrote him? He could put a phony name on, but that would be pretty much the same thing as not signing it.

Second, he tried the direct approach. He went to the shop at around 2:30, when he figured it would be dead and it was. He stood around in the door a few minutes and then he bought some bananas.

Third, he tried going to the store and communicating his discontent by simply moving the sign. He’d go 45 minutes after it closed, at 9, pick up the sign and put it away behind one of the benches along the side of the building. The next morning he would drive out and see it back up. Fine, but then he would come back from a movie and it would still be up. He tried this several times, to the same effect.

Fourth, he had this ratty old blanket that he never used. He went to the coffee shop and threw the blanket over the sign, completely covering it. It felt satisfying, but in the morning he could clearly see his blanket in the dumpster behind the place and he knew if he went out after 9 that night he would still see the sign up.

Harrison felt stumped by his own inability to confront people and his rational grasp of the fact that he was making a very big deal out of something very small. He left it alone for a few days. The weekend came. He did one of the other things he liked to do on weekends sometimes – he went to the Flea Markets. So he wandered through the aisles of the Flea Market, glancing at the junk, as he usually did. He seldom bought anything. He went for the smell of the dust in the air and the noise of the people talking. He liked to touch antique toys and feel the old, smooth painted metal in his hands. He liked to look at stacks of old books and think about which ones anyone might ever want to read again.

He walked by one of the many military and military memorabilia stands there at his local Flea Market and, for once, he decided to actually look around at the old flags and helmets. He was surprised to find what a collection of real weapons they had for sale there, too. Not just 80 year-old trench shovels, but real knives and clubs and brass knuckles. Stuff for killing and hurting now. The proprietor appeared to feel that there were all sorts of weapons that the modern man might need.

That next morning, when the coffee shop staff opened up their place at 7 AM, one of them stepped outside and began to brush off the welcome mat and she looked up at the “OPEN NOW!” sign standing out front of the place and saw there was something wrong with it. She set her broom against the wall and walked over. She found a note on the sign that said, “Take this thing inside nights.” The note was pinned to the sign with a switchblade knife.