Approximately a month ago, I was in Barnes & Noble, a store that I like for its atmosphere and because it usually has a small section that focuses on Indiana history – not the super academic variety, but the personal experience of daily life.

I used to visit this section regularly because I would select a Christmas present for my father from the shelves. The first one I just happened upon, sort of like I happened upon the section on Indiana history. It was Indiana Temples and was a photographic enhanced history of well-known basketball gymnasiums. Yes, to a lot of non-Hoosiers that seems weird, but to the generations of young boys (and girls) who had no video games, not much TV and went to small high schools that did not consolidate until the 60’s and 70’s, the hoop over the garage door was where you spent a lot of time.

And in the spring, there was no class basketball; every school had a shot at the state title. A lot of people outside Indiana know this without being aware of knowing it because the watched Hoosiers and maybe remember a recovering alcoholic played by Dennis Hopper jumping up and down on his his rebab bed yelling, “No school this small has ever been . .. ”

However, back to the books I gave my dad each Christmas. I thought about that last months as I looked at the Indiana History section and saw the cover photo of empty storefronts in small little towns: dusty windows, paint worn off the wooden facade, faded bits of signs remaining. I knew I would not be buying that book, not because Daddy has been dead so many years now, but because I think it would have been too sad to see in digital clearness. Better those main streets be remembered through the fog of memory and before they said good-bye to the Saturday night shoppers and the old bandstands where music actually was performed by townsfolk. My grandfather was in a barbershop quartet; you can still see such groups at special events, but not regularly and maybe in an impromptu gathering on a hot summer evening.

People still live in these towns, but they are different people and different towns. Many family names are the same and the towns appear the same on the map, yet ghosts are everywhere. I think it would be very sad to be an elderly man looking at those empty pictures and seeing those ghosts younger people can’t.

Maybe I didn’t buy the book because Daddy is dead and one of those ghosts; maybe I didn’t buy it because I can hear his voice telling tales of those days and I can imagine the look on his face as he looked at those pictures, stripped of the the life that once bustled there.