Were

There's a motel on the fringe of this shopping mall on the way to and from the boathouse.  I go by it every day.  It has one of those marquee signs outside, double sided.  It's old fashioned, the kind with white letters on a black background, lit somehow from inside.  The two sides tend to have different messages, so on my way to practice I read something like, "HAPPY 10TH BIRTHDAY NICHOLAS" and on my way back something like "CONTINENTAL BREAKFAST HBO." 

For the past few weeks the message on the back has read "SURPRISE WERE NOW A BEST WESTERN."
Every time I see it it bothers me.  Not very much, but I notice it each time I drive home from practice and I have an eyelash sized moment of irritation about the missing apostrophe.  Tonight I decided to stop, to see if there was anything I could do.  I figured that if I moved the letters apart a little bit the spacing would suggest an apostrophe and the world would be a tiny bit better.  I parked my car beside the sign and looked up at it.  A part of me has always been a tiny bit envious of people who work in convenience stores or other businesses with these signs, who have the ability to write messages to traffic.  What power.  If I had that power, I wouldn't abuse it. 

I stood underneath the sign.  It's lit up from within, covered with removeable black tiles that are either solid or cut out with the shape of a letter that lets the white light shine through.  The effect is an all-black background with white letters.  I had to go find a stick in the woods to reach the row that had the "WERE NOW" on it, and with the stick I could just barely move the tiles around.  As I moved the letters around I discovered that to correct the spacing I would need another black tile, because otherwise it would look like "WEIRE" with the bar of white light shining in between the separated "E" and "R".  I toyed with the idea of taking the "A" out after the word "NOW" and making the sign read "SURPRISE WE ARE NOW BEST WESTERN," but to do that I would have had to find something to climb up on and take out a bunch of tiles to cover over the blank spots I had left.  That seemed like it might be hard to explain to someone from the motel who might look out and see me.  It might seem obsessive and overgrammatical and bizarre.  Sheesh.   So I drove off, without making the world any better at all.

Comments

[Chris]

My goodness, the imagery this brings... v. funny! The challenges of the gramatically obsessed... ;-)

[Miss Littoral]

It tends to be "your" instead of "you're" that winds me up!!
What do they teach in schools these days?!!!

[Jeff]

You're not the only one:
Apostrophe Protection Society

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Eats, Shoots and Leaves

[a]

I totally agree. I too am bothered by things like that, and think it's hilarious that you stopped roadside to try to fix it.

[rn]

A very short story I wrote quite a while back. I thought it pertained, though it's more about alienation than grammar:

He added a comma. It wasn’t much. The tagger probably wouldn’t even notice. It was a huge sprawling spray on a vacant city-owned building that said, "Fuck you Sam" and Albert took out his paint can and changed it to, "Fuck you, Sam."

It wasn’t much, but that comma made him feel part of it, more worldly, more in touch.