Before its municipality approved removal, the Mill Street Obelisk kept the old neighborhood pinned in place, much like Benjamin Franklin's proverbial horseshoe nail preserved a kingdom before its negligent loss. Nobody much noticed the Mill Street Obelisk, either, but the old neighborhood's familiar geography feels misaligned now it's gone, as if an important river has been diverted into a foreign sea, the seven hills flattened and the sleepy hollows filled in and paved over. Now the obelisk has been toppled, Mill Street seems to windmill around the compass, clockwise then suddenly counterclockwise depending on the time of day. A sort of suburban Bermuda Triangle where GPS holds no dominion. I watch lines of lost cars follow Amazon trucks into one-way, cul-de-sac oblivion. The map isn't only not the territory, it's also not the map anymore, merely a confused cartographer's best guess of which direction to go.
The Mill Street Obelisk wasn't a real 'obelisk,' of course. That's just what I called this vertical block of grey granite set in the sidewalk that served no apparent purpose as far as I could tell. In my daydreams, however, ancient hieroglyphics were once carved along its four sides, perhaps prophesying of God's chosen Mayor who would rise from his supernatural slumbers at the appointed hour to conquer town hall and herald a new Golden Age for Plainfield, USA. Alas, I told myself as I strolled down Mill Street each day, such messages had long since been eroded by unforgiving time and inclement New England weather, lost forever until some passing archeologist decodes their meaning with the latest hyper-spectral imaging technology.
But forget my idle whimsy. The truth is that even local vandals couldn't be bothered to cover the obelisk with their spray-can graffiti. Most of the nearby walls are tagged and disfigured by barely legible slogans but the obelisk remained untouched, just an upright stone stick beneath notice, a slightly inconvenient pedestrian obstacle. Surely the council should demolish the damned thing and replace it with a useful traffic sign instead, a philistine Selectman suggested. And so overall-clad workmen armed with sledgehammers and power tools arrived before I had chance to bid the obelisk farewell. Think of waking up to Rome without its Colosseum, Paris without the Eiffel Tower, London without Big Ben. That was the magnitude of the loss of the Mill Street Obelisk. To Hell with the mayoral candidates who whine about increasing commercial zones and lowering taxes on Main Street business, next election I'm voting for the bearded, hippy guy who's all about planting more trees and turning that former gas station into a dog park. After all, maybe that's what the secrets of the Mill Street Obelisk actually foretold?
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