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The Space I Need Is Time
To create requires time. To have time requires seizing it.
On the radio, I heard a story that was like a fable: A big-time developer had swooped in to a small town, so sleepy it was almost dead, and bought up the old abandoned theater on Main Street so they could tear it down and build a McDonald’s. But just before the wrecking ball struck, some committed citizen revealed that the theater was home to an endangered species of ant. The town rallied around the ant and cast out the developer, saving their theater and their collective soul.
I was inspired. Suddenly all these bits of stories that had floated in my mind for years, decades, even, seemed to coalesce, brought together by the fable of “The Ant and the Theater.”
I could see the town, right off the interstate, with the main drag just a block or two long, mostly consisting of abandoned storefronts except for watering holes called “The Place” and “The Other Place,” and competing billboards advertising for a church and a strip club. (The church billboard slogans I had been collecting since college. “Forbidden Fruits Make Many Jams” was my favorite. “Is that a good or a bad thing?” a friend asked me at the time.)
A college kid considering dropping out takes a summer job scooping ice cream in the shop across from the theater that is…
