When I was five or six years old, living in Ashtabula, Ohio, there was a gas station shaped like a giant flying saucer with spinning reds and blinking lights. Man, was it cool. If I act old fashioned and persist on using my own memory alone, I have difficulty seeing it with clarity all these years later. I know it had that classic U.F.O Saucer shape made famous by countless 1950 'B' movies. This spacey disk, this bizarre aircraft seemingly always preparing for take-off towards the immense star sprayed skies high above, sat at the intersection near the Y.M.C.A (where a year or two later I would I play basketball.)
The gas station went out of business at some point in my childhood, the flying saucer was removed and hauled away and now twenty five years later, in its place is a CVS drug store, the kind that are ubiquitous all across the land where you can buy cheap toys made in China or Pharmaceuticals made in big corporations, a store whose interior fluorescent lights may light up your consumer experience but good luck with finding any traces of magic.
I think about this in relation and proximity to what's become of Ashtabula as a whole since I was a child. No one knows what happened to the flying saucer. Some say it is now in an obscure museum in the southern part of the state. Some say it sat in storage in a warehouse in Geneva for years where it was eventually torn to pieces and sold for scrap. Nobody really knows. I'll say it again. Nobody really knows.
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