BEEN THINKIN’ ABOUT… THE MAN IN THE STORE.
The old glass door opened, then closed. The air was air-conditioned cool, smelling faintly of mothballs. Long tables stretched far to the back, tables upon which were stacked work shirts, undershirts, slacks, work pants, blue jeans. The long-reaching walls of the store were lined with shelves — more jeans, overalls, coveralls, work boots. Doorless open square to the storeroom in the back was dark, an odd feeling for so bright a hot midday. At the left, a long counter, this one all glass with those sharp metal edges, a classy mid-century thing filled with the more expensive items of a men’s haberdashery turned full-time southern farmer’s clothing store. The man at the cash register had wispy hair white in the florescent light and a face and body both young and old. He looked up. “You boys lookin’ for something I can help y’all with?”
That was awhile back, just a chance encounter. Who was that man? What decisions in his life did he make that brought him to run this store? Did he think his life mattered? Outside, the heat hung deep, a deep and sonorous September heat of an old river town where bridge crossroads made an X in the spot framed by the dark Delta blues and rich, black dirt, riverboat ghosts and heavy hanging river vines and muddy banks thick with snakes. Across the hazy, dusty afternoon, soybean fields stretched out for miles, soybeans and cotton — a sleepy place punctuated by dusty gas stations and deep river lore. Big semi trucks rumbled over the bridge.
Is that man still working in his store? Is he still alive? Or waiting in a lonely, noisy nursing home? Time passes on and again, foreboding gravity against our lives humble and small, just passing footnotes in the old newspapers of record, life and breath and hope and a thousand-upon-a-thousand facets of emotion reduced to insignificant 8-point type: birth, death, and maybe a business opening back in 1965.
Eight whole years have passed since that moment in the haberdashery store and a whole lifetime can pass by in eight years. But in my mind’s eye, that moment was just a blink of an eye and that man — and I don’t know his name — will always be just in that moment. Baby face and aging man, standing alone in that store, a living, breathing tribute to all his life ever meant. That moment is gone but in my own mind he is simply there, forever, just like that. I will never forget him, never forget that he simply was, that he existed, that his life meant something. He was significant, as are you, whether I know or not.
Time moves on forever forward. Headlines come and go, as does the hysteria, the fear, the chaos, the anger, the distrust. But in the end, the things that matter, that really matter deep down and enduring, are the things we almost never take the time to notice. The real celebrities, the real headlines, the real things that count? All are all around us, quietly and forever. And again, the late summer heat undulates gently across the delta fields. I shake my head and turn the truck’s wheel over, headed back to the hills, again to the goodbye strains of Gregg Allman’s near-posthumous 2017 album. Over and again, always.
— Joshua Heston, editor-in-chief, StateoftheOzarks
© StateoftheOzarks 2026
