The Posts

According to legend, The Posts began showing up in small towns 15 or so years ago.



You've probably seen one on your drive to work or while walking your dog through your quiet neighborhood. Most people have no idea what they are and assume it's just the local kids causing trouble. I've walked past one for months without even giving it a second thought, or a first thought for that matter. That is until M showed me their secret.



He called them The Posts and said they are all over the country, in suburbs and small towns. They show up when people move away. More specifically when people who will be sorely missed move away. The one we are standing in front of showed up six weeks ago, almost two years to the day, M's best friend and next door neighbor and her family moved out of state.


M's story:


"It was really weird. I drive this street everyday, I'd passed this telephone pole a hundred times and never even looked twice at it. Then last week, I was on my way to get a sandwich and go to the Drunk and I noticed a picture stapled to it at about eye level. It was just there kind of moving a little in the breeze. I couldn't see what was in the picture, just that it was there when the day before there had been nothing. I didn't think too much about it until a few days later there was something else nailed next to the picture. I went to the Drunk, bought a couple Cd's and a soda at the deli next door and on my way back stopped across the street from the Pole. I walked over to the pole and stopped dead in my tracks when I saw the picture and the new item which was a small plastic army man holding a rifle up to his eye. At the end of the rifle was a tiny flower glued to the barrel. I looked closely at the picture and dropped my soda when I realized it was a picture of the tree house we had made in her backyard when we were 10 years old."



M pointed to the picture now faded by the sun and the weather.



"I thought I was being punked and I looked around for camera's and waited for Ashton to jump out wearing that stupid trucker hat, but it didn't happen. It had to be her doing it but how she was on the other side of the country or even the other side of the world by now. How could these things be here of all places and why on a telephone pole and why now after 2 years of nothing?"



"I drove home and pulled the box out from under the bed that contained everything from my friendship with her. She was everything to me when I was little, every game I played ws with her, every tree I climbed was with her, every spaceship flown and every planet discovered, she was my co-captain. And then her Mom's decided to move and the next day they were all gone and I never heard from her again. Not a note, a letter, a postcard, a bye drawn in the dirt, nothing. They simply vanished."

M touched a saints medal fixed into place on the pole with a small brass-colored nail.

"I found this medal (one of her mom's had given us matching saints' necklaces after we spent a week pretending to rescue Joan of Arc from the clutches of the evil french church leaders) and I went to the pole and nailed it here, underneath the photo of our tree house, and waited. For two weeks I drove by the Telephone pole three times a day, looking for something else to appear. A couple months ago, just as I was starting to feel stupid and depressed for thinking there was some hope of this actually being her I saw this."



M pulled a folded postcard out of his back pocket and handed it to me. I opened it and looked at the picture side. Stripes. Wait. Not just stripes, each stripe was actually a sliver of something like a sliver of a photograph but a bunch of different photos mixed up and stuck back together in what looked like random order. I flipped it over to read the message:

"out by the boxcar waiting,

take me away to nowhere plains"

I looked up at him with a puzzled look on my face I'm sure because he said:

"Song lyrics."

He took another postcard out of his pocket unfolded it and handed it to me. This one wasn't stripes like the first, it was dots. A bunch of dots all lied up and perfectly spaced apart but some of them were larger and darker than others and along one edge they actually overlapped one another for a single row. On the other side:

"You make me want to write pretty things,

to people far away..."

I handed it back to him and he refolded it and crouched down to reach for a little flat birdhouse-like thing on the Post near the sidewalk. M opened the little door, placed the postcard inside and closed the little door.

I'd had absolutely no interest in country music before I'd overheard the boy with the black hair talking about it with some guy at school. The black-haired boy no longer went to my high school, but every once in a while, he would show up to hang out in the music room or to sit in his car in the parking lot waiting for one of his friends to either ditch class or sneak off campus for lunch.

I don't have a car, but I walk through the lot everyday, in hopes that someone I know will take pity on me and offer me a ride home, so I don't have to ride the the bus. It never happens and i inevitably have to board the big yellow bus already packed with middle school kids.

One Thursday, I heard him talking to another guy with died hair about a new band he'd found in the bargain bin at a local record store. "They don't even listen to the Cd's they put in that bin. I don't get it. Has the entire staff lost their minds?"

The guy dismissed the black-haired boy's outrage by saying, "I don't like country music of any kind, man. Doesn't matter what 10 cent word they put in front of it. Besides, you know what kinds of kids they hire at Sweetheart: NPR geeks, jazz nerds, a few Goth hold outs, a punk or two, and a metalhead to keep the jazz nerds agitated."

"Don't forget the Brit-Pop boys and the Buckley Requirement." The black-haired boy replied as he flicked his cigarette to the ground about a foot in front of me. I stopped abruptly and looked at it and then him. he caught my gaze, smiled slyly, winked like Clooney in an Oceans movie, and I walked right into a car, nearly dropping my books. He smiled at me again as I hurried to catch the bus.

And here I am, standing in front of the country rack of My Sweetheart, the Drunk, flipping through the Cd's with people on the covers that look like the relatives I hate visiting. And worse than the covers are the names of the bands: The Well Buckets, Trailer Park Tornado Survivors Union #136, Lance and His Lazy Eye? So weird. But, if the black-haired boy likes it, i guess i can give it a shot.

I don't even know if he is going to show up today. I've been coming in since that Thursday, hanging out, hoping to run into him. I have no idea what I'll even say if he shows up, or if he'll even recognize me from the parking lot at school. Thinking about it, kind of makes me want to throw up. I keep repeating to myself, "Stay cool, it's OK, he might like you." But it's really difficult to stay cool when the record store kids keep sneaking up on me like ninjas asking if i need any help. I have jumped like five times. I am starting to think they are making a game out of scaring me.

O.K. I better do something to calm down in case he shows up. I grab the file card closest to my hand (The Tow Trucks) and head to the counter.

The owners of My Sweetheart, the Drunk were a middle-aged, long married, hippie couple who started the store by selling bootleg concert recordings of their favorite ever-touring band. From what I have gathered, a couple of guys in black suits strolled into the shop one day and gently let the couple know, they needed to "switch gears" or face some jail time and huge fines, then they packed up their trunk with every tape in the store and drove away. By the beginning of the next month, the couple had made friends with a few legal distributors of records and Cd's, turned their once homemade shop into a full-fledged music store named after an old British rock song. They invited musicians from all over to perform in the store and sell their albums and eventually became such a popular place for up and coming musicians, someone played almost every other weekend.

Then it happened. A young man with a guitar walked into the store, sat down on the chair they had set up and started to play. Those who were there swear that not only did no one move while the young man sang, some say no one even took a breath. The owners were so overwhelmed by his music and his performance, they not only changed the name of the store when he tragically died two years later, they began an unspoken part of the interview process known as the "Buckley Requirement." Those who knew were in, those who didn't: bottom of the very tall stack of applications. "I would sell my soul to work there, even just for Christmas," one of my friends had said to me over lunch once, his eyes glazed over with desire.

Sweetheart or The Drunk (depending on how cool you are) is a true music lovers store, with an extensive variety of musical styles and the thing that made it rise above all other music stores in the Tri-state area... you can listen to almost every CD in the store, before you buy it.

Handing The Tow Trucks card to the skinny boy with glasses behind the counter, I look at the door again expectantly, and once again jump when he returns and hands me the CD with a loud "Here you go!"

I'm convinced that Sweetheart has the most comfortable sofas in Gravity. They are even better than the ones my mom spent months in stores, sitting and laying on until she finally made a decision and got rid of the old floral print ones. Much better. I settle in and begin getting to know the Tow Trucks, who are surprisingly not as scary sounding as the are looking on the cover. They kind of sound like the old records (yes the big flat black things) my grandpa used to play when we spent summers with him and grandma. A few more songs and a little daydream of Grandma's picnic lunches and I return the CD to the same counter guy who got it for me. "whadja think?", he asked more to know if I was going to buy it than my critical opinion of the group. "they are pretty good", I say " A little old-timey for me today though..."

And I turn to find another disc to kill some time. Halfway to the country section, the front door bell chimes, I look over and my heart almost stops in my chest.

It's him!

He's so beautiful, but not like a girl; he's like a mechanic or service station attendant, like the one who always fills up my mom's SUV, rugged, unpolished. I'm starting to feel the way I did when he smiled at me in the parking and I ran into the car. I've been trying to figure out something to say to him without looking like a total idiot. I've been trying, during every minute of my free time, to "accidentally" run into him again. I tried to figure out other places he would hangout, since Sweetheart had until today, proven to be a bust, but none I was friends with knew who he was or where he liked to go. I was becoming a bit obsessed with tracking him down, which is totally unlike me. I'm not even sure why I wanted to find him, what I would say when I did, or what I expected to happen once I did find him. It was OK until Mom and Dad caught me leaving the house on a Sunday afternoon. Sunday was supposed to be a day for Heavenly Father and family. A day without working, television, friends or even sometimes cooking. Who thought that up? Anyway, I stopped being devoted to that idea when the kids at school started making fun of me for not being able to go to the movies on Sundays and not drinking sodas at lunch. Like 10th grade isn't difficult enough, I have to be persecuted too? So i decided to invoke my free agency and announced to my parents that I wanted to take a break , in order to concentrate on my schoolwork and fit in with the other kids at my new school. We haven't been in Gravity very long and all the kids at Church are so much younger than me. After a week of serious discussion, and I assume, hours of prayer, they said they would give me some space to settle into Gravity, but I would have to keep going to Church at least, and in a few months we would talk about it again.

So here I am, in the record store on a Sunday, and he is finally walking through the door and I think I am about to find out how a Trailer Park Tornado Survivor feels just before they join the Union. He looks at me and I don't know if I am going to die or throw up. Before I can do eithermy legs quickly take me to another part of the store. I wind up in the POP sectionof all places, as he saunters ( yes I swear to God, he saunters)over to the exact spot where i was standing flipping through the cards. He looks at the card I left the file open to, looks at me and smirks. The winds start blowing around me, pulling up trees, making people scurry back into their houses to board up the windows and put the children in a safe place. I start flipping nervously through the cards and he picks one and moves down the aisle in my direction. The house next door starts to wrench itself from the foundation with a terrifying noise. I look around and there is no where to go, no place to hide, I grab a card and head to the counter, I can make it to a sofa and the safety of headphones if I hurry. I hand the card to the same counter guy who has been torturing me all afternoon, he looks at the card and at me with confusion, but goes to get the CD.

The black-haired boy is now heading towards the counter as well, and I notice that no one else seems to be working the counter except my tormentor. The dust is filling the air, stinging my skin and my eyes as the house I am in starts to creek and shift against the wind. He stops next to me just as counterguy hands me a CD by some teen pop princess and my house with a great tearing/smashing/crunching noise rips free from the earth and soars into the swirling funnel. My eyes move from the disc to the counterguy who shrugs, to the black-haired boy who laughs ever so slightly under his breath, and I bolt to the sofa furthest from the counter and the two boys at the counter. Now I know, I'm not going to puke, I'm going to die, right here on this sofa. At closing time the counterguy will come to shake me awake, thinking I am asleep, and after a few shakes he'll start yelling for someone to help he thinks something is wrong with the boy in the back couch. This is terrible! It's nothing I had imagined, nothing good would come of this it was all a loss.

I put the disc in the CD player but I don't push play, I close my eyes and try to disappear into the sofa. Until I feel the sofa move like someone is sitting at the other end. I open one eye and it's him, sitting there with a stack of discs he actually wants to listen to, not the crap mistake I grabbed in fear. I can't believe he is so close to me. I want to say hi but I'm so scared for some reason. I could touch him if I moved my hand just a few inches to the right. What was making me think like this? I've never thought about touching anyone like this before. It's weird, he's a guy and I know this isn't the Plan for our lives. But I can't stop thinking about the way he smiled at me, the way he wears his shirt not quite buttoned all the way up, the way the little medal on his necklace rests on his chest just below the dip in his neck.

How long would I have to sit here pretending to listen to this awful CD before it was safe to escape? Was there anyway to salvage my nonexistant reputation?

The weight shifts on the sofa, I can smell him as he leans toward me, but all I can hear is the pounding of my heart in my chest. A few seconds later as the weight redistributes itself on the sofa, an acoustic guitar begins to play slowly and quietly in my head phones, and a moment after that a beautiful female voice begins to sing. Her voice is overwhelming in it's simple beauty, no effects, or recording tricks, like she is in the room singing to me. Her voice lulls me into a daze and I don't feel him get up to leave. I feel trapped by this voice, I never want it to leave my ears and when the last song finishes it takes me a moment to let go and open my eyes again. The sofa is empty and so is the store, save the counterguy and one other customer. I eject the disc and return it to its' case and head towards the counter pulling the crumpled 20 dollar bill out of my pocket. I hand counterguy the two discs and ask for a copy. He holds both up as if to say "Ummm which one?" I point to the one on the right and he smiles, heads to the back and brings me a cd sized gift box. "Your money is no good here today," he says and hands me the box, "See you next week."

I'm not sure what to do,which is obvious to counterguy who shoos me away from the counter and out the door. The bus ride is uneventful and no one says anything when I get home and go upstairs to my room. Sitting on my bed, I open the little box stamped with the Sweetheart logo to find Vicki Lynn Meuller, in all her southern frontporch swing glory. A folded piece of paper falls onto my bed when I take the CD out of the box.

Unfolding it I read this:

" I've seen you around a few times,

next time you should say hello

instead of running into a car."

-M