The lights went out at Sears Crosstown in the mid-Nineties, but for seventy-odd years they provided a sort of garish crossroads for people who were driving East into Midtown or West towards the river. By the Nineteen-twenties, Sears had established regional hubs all around the country. It threw up behemoth-sized shopping warehouses to accommodate stock, stage its shipping operations, and make goods and services available to the home folk. Going to Sears was part of an overall consumer profile that, when I was a kid, bracketed hour-long excursions to downtown department stores. Once we were done with the dull stuffs Sears was eager to provide, we wandered into the rusticated stone and cast-iron facades that had been open for business since the 1890’s. There we’d pick our furniture – which would be delivered at no charge; replace a toaster that had ceased to “pop”; browse velvet-lined jewel-cases places like Brodnax set out to lure passersby. If you were not sense-deprived, you could smell the oil-rich aromas of roasting peanuts and run over to Planter’s to have one of the salespeople fill a little bag for you. My dad liked ‘em with the skins still on them. (I removed the dry-textured things from my peanuts with clandestine haste and finished up my bag before he did.) We’d finish up at Court Square eating popcorn or feeding the squirrels out of vending machines that gave you a handful of stuff few other living creatures would consider eating. For some reason, the local squirrels were mad about the stuff and would cluster at your feet until you got up to go, at which point they chattered obscenely. I was keen on such downtown institutions as the old Army Surplus store, where olive-drab canteens, blankets, and, sometimes, whole uniforms could be bought by war-crazed civilians. Being of this stripe myself, I rarely left the place without something usefully bellicose. I was allowed to purchase a gun there once, a WWI carbine rifle that had possibly fallen from the hands of a doughboy as he lunged toward the enemy from a barbwire-snagged hole-in-the-ground. It was much heavier than the bb-gun that was my pride and joy for as long as it lasted. As such, all I could do was trot it out to show people. Or worship it privately.

When all’s said and done
If you’ve got a gun –
You want to shoot it.

I am against mechanized violence nowadays, but when I was a kid, I wanted to have guns around. This may suggest that one should outgrow the urge to have guns at a fairly early age, but I am not urging the reader to accept this notion. In fact, until well into the Vietnam Era, there was no shame in wanting to be a soldier – or trying to establish an historical connection to the fighting nobody ever wanted to talk about. And the most efficient and enjoyable means of establishing a historical connection involved going out and shooting at something. Or at least thinking about it.

The great Sears tower, which lit up the evening sky for so many decades, had sunk into a lights-out decrepitude when I visited Memphis some years ago – though I hear it’s going to be made into a vast warren of post-yuppie style apartments. More power to ‘em, I say. Mid-sized cities have been late to adopt the neo-urbanist strategy whereby formerly commercial structures take on a new life as upscale apartment buildings. But the idea appears to be catching on. In Richmond, where my studio is, development has begun to encroach on the lights-dimly-burning decrepitude that has, thus far, saved my block from opportunistic hands and eyes. Now developers have made common cause with wannabe urbanites and are beginning to move in on the area. I have begun to consider the regrettable possibility of a wide-screen television occupying the little parlor I have made; yuppie banquets spreading out into rooms that are, as yet, embryonic; a satellite dish appearing on a roof that accommodates the new air conditioning system we had to put in after we began to wilt in the summer.

I can only hope, when the New Sears begins its second life, that a cautionary reverence will pre-empt the urge to re-landscape the place – or that automobile aesthetics won’t prevail over long-standing uses and practices that have kept the surrounding area green and all the little bungalows affordable. In this particular painting, I wanted the tower and its penetrating neon to be the presence it always had been. It is a reflection on both past and present. Dread and promise, hope and familiarity, danger and comfort mingle to create a complex reality that pulses from every stoop and window. Anonymous places leave well-worn grooves the great monoliths by which an area is defined do not. Sears may have been the beacon, but the community that surrounds it has paid its way and needs to be there so that people can keep on doing midnight errands and coming back to a place that’s decent and comfortable.