Signpost

“The “G” is upside down.”

About a year ago, give or take, the county or the state or somebody put a new street sign at the beginning of the road. Our church is on the corner of Highway 181 and what is now called Pleasant Grove Road in Todd County, Kentucky.  When we moved here four years ago, it was called “Pleasant Grove Church Road.”  Nobody knows whose idea the name change was, or why; only that not long after I became the preacher here somebody painted over the word “Church” on the original street sign in the same green color as the rest of the metal background.

For all I know the name could have been changed years ago, and only now is anybody getting around to correcting the signage.  That’s life in the country; things happen when they happen.  The first lesson I had to learn moving here from the big city and later the suburbs is that in the country, nothing happens right away just because you want it to.  I’ve had DSL Internet availability at the church building for 18 months, but cannot even get dial-up at my house 3/4 of a mile away.  Five years of nagging AT&T to provide service to a willing customer, and still nothing.

Finally, earlier this spring, the road got a new sign.  Four inches square on each side and sticking six feet up out of the ground, the kelly green post marks the official beginnig of Pleasant Grove Road.  All of the mailboxes and house numbers between the highway and the forest are taken from the distance to that piece of timber.  If you’re looking for somebody who lives on this street, you no longer have to peer through the trees and limbs to find the street sign; it’s right there and will not be ignored.

But the “G” is upside-down.

What’s more, it may be upside-down on purpose.  “Pleasant Grove Road” is spelled out on two of the post’s four sides in spray-painted 3-inch white stencils.  On both sides, the letter “G” is flipped over, oriented to look like a backwards lowercase “e.”  Why?  Maybe the person who painted the sign made the same mistake twice.  Maybe he messed up the first side, noticed his mistake, then decided that instead of fixing it he’d just make the other side the same way and hope nobody would notice.  Or maybe he honestly thought that that was how the letter “G” was supposed to look.

In Todd County, all three explainations are equaly plausible.  But none of them really matter.

What does it say about me that the first thing I notice about the new street sign is not how much better it is than the old one, but how silly it looks with an upside-down letter?

I guess I’m just a fault-finder by nature.  I look at situations, organizations, and yes, even people, with an eye toward fixing what’s wrong.  I want people and things to be the best they can be.  But every day when I go for my walks/runs down Pleasant Grove Road, I have to walk past that street sign with the upside down “G” and realize that not everything is within my power to fix.  There’s a reason my mom and sisters warned my wife before we even got married not to let me try to fix things around the house.  I can tell that something is broken, but I have absolutely no capacity to do anything about it.  (True story — I once came within an inch of killing myself plugging in a dryer.)

Perhaps that upside down “G” is there to remind me of my own limitations. Perhaps it is there because I need to be more patient with people, with life, with powers beyong my control.  Perhaps it’s there because that’s just the way country life is — beautiful but flawed, proud yet slightly defective, wanting to be appreciated for its usefulness instead of criticized for its fallenness.

Whatever the reason, the signpost — upside-down “G” and all — marks the beginning of my journeys down a beautiful country mile.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.