SIGNS

Today I offer you two signs – quite literally – though I cannot help but consider them figuratively as well – as signs.

First: the covered sign.
I keep wanting to know what is under there, whether it was covered up because it is no longer true, or because it is not yet applicable, waiting to become useful. It hovers between these states: either no-longer or not-yet, or perhaps both. I cannot know its role – perhaps it is a periodic sign, waiting to re-emerge when its time comes, only to be covered again. Does that explain why it is covered? If it were never to be needed again, why not just take it down? If it is not yet needed, why has it been up so long?

This sign has been like this ever since I resigned my job and moved to live with the wife. It just sits there at this intersection – the one between the college and the town, between the highways leading to different periods of our lives. I want to look under the garbage bags used to cover this sign up, but I can’t bring myself to do so – I stood in front of it for a few minutes after photographing decided whether I should; I didn’t. But I keep wondering why it is there, or still there; whether it is facing obsolescence or a potential waiting at some now unknown time.

For the time being I just wait until a storm – or perhaps a couple of teenagers, or pack of drunken students from the college – tears the garbage bags off of the sign so I can finally see what it has to say. Until then, I wait and wonder.

Second: the numbers.
I can no longer count the number of times I have been over this one in my head; it is so utterly inscrutable. It sits there alone at the base of the hill that leads to campus, and to home – for the time being. There is no other sign nearby to give it context, to help explain its existence, its rationale, for being where it is – unlike the covered sign, which is surrounded by a bevy of off camera signage.

There is no sign like this one elsewhere on the street, at least not that I have found. It only seems to mark the beginning of the ascent, the moment at which the walk begins to get a little rougher – the counterpart to the easy trip into town. I look for patterns, relationships between the sets, I consider possible correlations to the nearby highways, or perhaps it is a geographical marker, or elevation. To me it could mean anything, therefore nothing. This sign stands there as the opposite to the covered sign, which seems to full of potential – whether expended or expectant. This one seems to just be there, isolated, awaiting someone who will be able to decipher it and put up a companion to occupy that seeming superfluity of space on its post.

I am both confused by and drawn to these signs today. A few days ago, perhaps, they would have made one of my lists, maybe been relegated to a rant about the absurdity of our human endeavors, the excessive need to mark territory or the ease with which we allow things to drop into disuse. Instead, today, I see them as they are, as signs.