Sheriff's Building

I was out on George Boulevard near the weathered sign angled into the ground proclaiming "Future site of the sheriff's administrative center."

I don't know if it was the heat or what, but all of a sudden I started seeing things.

Out on US 27, caravans of workers' beat-up pickups crowd the road, an endless stream of dump trucks race to get another load, trailers pulling backhoes and big trucks laden with material line up behind cement trucks, their drums lazily revolving.

At the building site, the noise is deafening: pile drivers rhythmically pounding, generators humming, hammers banging, drills screeching, backing-up trucks beep beeping, foremen hollering at their workers. A perpetual dust cloud hovers over the area as workers in hardhats and jeans- flag people and carpenters and laborers and cement finishers scurry around purposely.

In Mrs. Brown's class, Jimmy proudly exclaims "My daddy's got a job!" Local businesses that were hanging on by their fingernails report they might make it after all. A nearby store adds a cashier, a bank a teller, an architect, a draftsman, a downtown restaurant a second location, and snowbirds complain about the traffic.

And the people in the community spurred by the activity and a growing feeling of well being cautiously spend some hoarded funds on things they'd sorely missed: dinner out, a movie, an extra scoop of ice cream, a new car.

It is like, so much like, the lights going back on at the shuttered factory in a factory town.

Suddenly, my head cleared and I saw the traffic was light on 27 and the building site pastoral, and then I remembered that our leaders instead of stepping up, swallowing hard and making it happen, punted.

John Dyce
Lorida