Sometimes when I’m sad, I become convinced that the world is going to end. And it will end someday, of course, but scientists give it billions of years yet. My “sense of impending doom” (the phrase psychiatrists use to describe this type of fear) is all out of proportion to what I know to be true.
Today I am sitting in traffic on a commercial strip in West Lebanon, New Hampshire, on my way to shop for groceries at Purity Supreme. I find this part of town particularly disheartening. In the past twenty years Staples, CVS, Subway, Pizza Hut, Shaws, TJ Maxx, PayLess, Borders, Burger King, Applebee’s, Wal-Mart, and Purity Supreme have all built franchises in pastures where wide-hipped Holsteins once kept the grass as short as a bowling green.
