Closed

It took me over two hours to get to work today.  Not entirely sure why traffic was so bad.  There was only a little snow, and no accidents.  My co-workers had the same trouble, milling into the office about an hour late.

The south side of Chicago is surprisingly barren during winter mornings.  There’s no one on the streets, no kids in the schoolyard, just the sound of wind and the whirl of snow.  It’s not so bad by my apartment, it’s a relatively active area.

But when I start heading down the road, it gets worse.  I stop at a light about five or six blocks from home, and see a boarded up chinese restaraunt to my left.  The sign above the door was broken, about half of it missing.  The sign hanging from the wall is in better shape, its lights and plastic practically untouched by the elements.  I think that made it even more desolate, the pristine sign.

I imagine a Chinese family, full of hope, and wanting to open a successful restaraunt in Chicago, along a main road.  The location is good and the building was nice back in its prime.  They open up and wait for the customers to roll in.  They wait, and wait, and wait.  They cut their prices, hold promotions, and nothing.  Eventually, their hopes dashed and their spirits broken, they close.  I picture them standing in front of their former place of business, giving that pristine sign a last look before leaving.

To my right is a building that may have been a factory at one time, all the windows covered in plywood.  There was a time when America made a lot of their own goods, a time when you looked at the bottom of an item and maybe, just maybe, you’d see ‘made in U.S.A’ imprinted on it.

One by one, factories close, their jobs shipped overseas.  Suddenly thousands of people are left without jobs.  I remember when I would talk to new Wal-Mart employees, and most of them were from mills and factories that have closed.  The world has moved on without them.  America has moved from factories to corporations, for better or for worse.

Maybe in a hundred years all the old darelict factories will be refurbished into offices, and those old dead areas will be allowed to thrive again.  Each one of those closed and dead buildings represents broken lives, each one with its own story.

Zel-kun out.