Is there a word for when something isn’t ahead of its time but completely in it—but from a while ago? Not something retro or something futuristic. But something that slips into your memory as permanent, just because it always has been to you? Like a giant oak tree you may have passed everyday on the way to school or and beat-up old house that never seems to get fixed and never seems to get any worse—where even the untreated plywood over a missing window pane seems in place? That’s what the Sunrise Convenience Store will always look like to me.

Even now as I run away from home I can’t even feel nostalgic for the place, because it is all right there just as it always has been. With the sign on the door that promises “Facsimile Service” like it’s a bright future headed to your homes—but which you might sample inside today. Step into the Sunrise Convenience Store and see the future of the past. Try out their Automatic Teller Machine.

And even though the Sunrise Convenience Store always opens before you knew it closed, The Hartford Journal chains a coin-operated newspaper box to the corner of the parking lot. Each day the new issue, with the key stories half under the fold, gets propped into the window of the box. Just one issue. One to tell the fifteen-minutes of rush hour each day that the Hartford Journal may be shrinking, but it still knows what happened yesterday. One issue to soak up the box incase some drunk from the only bar in town stumbles home and tries to make the paper live up to its nickname (The Hartford Urinal). These boxes stand in the strangest places. Often in the middle of a country road, chained a telephone pole next to a sandy pull off onto someone’s farm. As if you might care enough about Connecticut news but not subscribe. Instead they stand in hope that you might pass by at forty-five miles an hour, catch a headline, jam on the brakes and reverse into a James-Bond maneuver to grab that one paper on your way to work. This has to be a service recommended by the same guys who argued long ago to remove the phonebooth in favor or a payphone that juts out awkwardly under a sign (“Call From Your Car!”)

On the door of the Sunrise Convenience Store are three posters. One of a grampa with reading glasses, one of a little girl in blow-dried pigtails—both smile face-first into a twist cone of chocolate and vanilla soft serve. The third poster probably came in a box from the future along with everything else and advertises Magic Shell, the chocolate sauce that hardens on the ice cream. All three posters look bleached from the sun, but in a way they have never not been bleached from the sun. The forward-thinking people who designed the clapboard, one story, fall-out-proof building and its wooden sun with yellow triangle rays must have seen into the future and brought back these UV-proof signs that can never get any more bleached than the blue-faced family and their blue magic shell that might somehow taste like strawberries.

It doesn’t smell the same. I mean: it doesn’t smell—the same as it always did. It always didn’t smell. One more time: the way that it does not smell today is the same way that it never smelled. Coffeepots never come off the burner, the deli case never seems cold enough, and the car air fresheners may have been delivered from an all-blue future too. Jumbles in the Journal and tonight’s winning lotto jackpot are the only indicators of today’s date. In here you might send a telegram or you might send a longer note on their facsimile machine.