Signs like these are around every corner, it seems, in Santa Fe. This Quitting Business banner on a downtown business holding a liquidation sale this weekend flashes bold. When you see these words across a business that has been serving customers for many years, we are reminded that we are on the cusp, as the poet Elizabeth Alexander writes.
I'll pull my favorite lines from her Inaugural Poem:
We encounter each other in words, words
spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,
words to consider, reconsider.
...
We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that which we cannot yet see.
...
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp...
My prayer is that we are on the cusp of peace, understanding, stability. I hope that we have a leader who will collectively take our hands and lead us out of the dark place that we find ourselves in financially. I feel such loss when I see the signs go up on on my favorite "mom and pop" landscaping/nursery place and restaurant. And yet, I realize our new president isn't God. Pray for him and for those who make the decisions.
Posted by: carron e. | January 23, 2009 at 09:30 AM
These signs have been around my city for years now as industry has died and I mourn the losses each time it happens.
Today, I was in a shop where I buy a lot of my clothes. It's owned by the daughter of friends of my late former in-laws and I've done business with her for over 20 years.
She thanked me profusely for coming by and I told her that with things the way they are in our county that I'm trying to stay away from chains and only do business with locally owned and operated shops. She said that she's doing the same. And we agreed that we needed to start a movement in that direction. Now I'm wondering how we could get such a movement started. It's definitely an idea whose time has come.
Maybe I should sit down with the mayor . . .
Posted by: Kay Dennison | January 23, 2009 at 05:46 PM