Slice of Heaven Bakery

While passing by I saw this bakery in Valley Park, MO, and thought, "Why pass it by?" So I went in and it was the old-fashioned kind of bakery that doesn't serve $8 paninis. Decades had passed since I was last in a normal pastry bakery like this one. They had St. Louis Cardinals cookies (I guess we're in the World Series), kolaches, danishes, cakes, brownies, cupcakes, turnovers, doughnuts, and chocolate-covered Oreos, to name a few. I could have only one slice of heaven so selected a cannoli, a dessert I can't make in my own kitchen. They gave it to me in a small white box with a cellophane insert, just like a piece of jewelry in a presentation box. I am so glad I did not simply pass by.

The Beloved Paint Sign

Long-lived small-town businesses sometimes keep the same signs up for years, and this is the old Pittsburgh Paints sign I remember from when I was a kid, seen two weeks ago in Lebanon, MO. It's so simple and beautiful, and no TV commercial ever opened up such imaginative vistas as did these letters in these colors, hung high in the sky like modern art; not designed to make you want to buy buckets of paint, but to make you marvel and dream of possibilities... (we didn't know the lead in the paint was bad). I used to think I dreamt this sign, but I did not not. Life really includes it and still does. Now to find somebody who still has the Red Goose Shoes sign...

Times of the Signs, Part 2: Ruma, IL

Took this through the glass of an abandoned shop that apparently sold hardware/car parts and things.