If Walls Could Talk

Today I awoke to a steel-gray Cleveland sky. Before long it opened, dropping its contents in a persistent stream of semi-spring raindrops. After my wife went to work, I packed my laptop and set off to find a new coffee house. The one I frequented for a number of years recently closed, dying a slow death along with the local economy.

I splashed along in my car block by block, without any luck. I soon made my way to an older part of town, close to Cleveland proper, hoping to find a diamond in the rough. I prefer smaller coffee houses that are off the beaten path. The kind where the term "regular" still applies, and where regulars need only talk about the weather or current events when ordering, because their made-to-order coffee was prepared from memory the second they entered.

I craned my neck, inspecting storefront after passing storefront, hoping to find my new home away from home. But I didn't. Instead, I began to notice a prevailing trend of empty stores and vacant homes. I imagined the structures in their prime, bustling with the vigor of day-to-day life. Children standing in line for an afternoon matinee at the movie theatre; local politics being debated by free-timers at outdoor restaurants and cafes; families and neighbors enjoying company on roomy, shade-cooled front porches, as smoke billowed upward from a nearby grill.

But now I saw none of that.

The theater sat dormant, its only occupants the ghosts roaming up and down rows of dusty seats behind dirty windows and peeling paint. There were no customers at the restaurants and cafes. A few still had tables resting out front, missing the comfort of conversation and hoping someday they'd again be noticed. Perhaps the saddest sight of all, the house that somebody used to call a home, was now reduced to a mere address. Its windows, the eyes through which I'm certain countless holiday meals could be witnessed by the casual passer-by, were shuttered with plywood. The house mourned as rain pelted gently warping boards, causing rusted tears to streak downward from weathered nail heads.

These structures, which somehow managed to be both modest and majestic in the not-too-distant past, now are nothing more than sad reminders of better times. Where did we go wrong? I thought. How did we find ourselves in this place? How could all of this history just disappear as if it never existed? A flash of lightning and steady bass rumble of thunder brought me back from wherever my mind wandered. I turned and headed for home.

Today I set out searching for a new coffee house. What I found was a story deserving of a better ending.