Every Sunday morning I drive through a small town in the middle of nowhere. It’s your typical depressed and calcifying town with dirt frontage roads, sea foam green ranch houses with 18-inch wide scalloped asbestos siding, and the shell of a four-store strip mall complete with a grass-invaded parking lot. One thing that sets this town apart from many other small towns in the area is that it has not one but two gas stations. Or at least, it had two gas stations.<\/p>\n
A couple of months ago the BP<\/a> gave up the struggle. But they didn’t take down any of their signs, or even remove old merchandise from the store windows. In fact, I don’t know exactly when the station closed, but I remember noticing three weeks ago that gas was still listed as $2.99\/gallon there while prices at the other station in town had fallen to $2.67\/gallon. This week, driving past, gas was still listed as $2.99\/gallon while prices at the other station had fallen all the way to $2.12\/gallon.<\/p>\n But that’s the only clue that the station is no longer operating. Merchandise still packs the windows and no grass has made inroads into it’s asphalt yet. Neither the “open” nor the “closed” sign hangs in the door. It’s as if time just stopped at this gas station somewhere between opening and closing time about 6 weeks ago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Every Sunday morning I drive through a small town in the middle of nowhere. It’s your typical depressed and calcifying town with dirt frontage roads, sea foam green ranch houses with 18-inch wide scalloped asbestos siding, and the shell of a four-store strip mall complete with a grass-invaded parking lot. One thing that sets this … Continue reading The Meeting of Two Times<\/span>