On a scorching Ohio summer day, Aaron and Corey pull into a shady corner of a movie theater parking lot to eat lunch. What they find there is hard to explain, and even harder to fit into its surroundings. In this 7 Minute Stories episode, an ordinary stop becomes a reflection on beauty, disorder, and the surprises hiding in everyday life.
📬 Be a part of the 7 Minute Stories Newsletter
*Dive deeper and connect with Aaron on...
The Team:
Story Created & Performed by: Aaron Calafato
Senior Audio Engineer: Ken Wendt
Additional Vocals: Cori Calafato
Original Theme Music: thomas j. duke
Follow & Binge The 7MS Catalog
TRANSCRIPT
Cori and I were looking for a little shade, a reprieve from the sun, somewhere to park our car. What we found was unexpected. Possibly a vineyard. It’s complicated, and I’ll tell you all about it right after the music.
You’re listening to 7 Minute Stories. This is Season 7.
It was one of those 105-degree summer days. It was a damn hot summer, and it wasn’t a workday.
During the week, and this might be a Midwestern or Rust Belt thing, if you’re driving through a suburb or a city in the Midwest during the lunch hour, you’ll sometimes find cars parked in empty parking lots. Probably where a store used to be before it got shipped overseas or just went out of business.
You’ll see a car near the edge of the lot, where there’s a tree or some shade. The brake lights might be on, and maybe you’ll hear sports radio coming through the window while someone eats something from the drive-through.
This is lunch for a lot of people here. In the summer, they’re always looking for shade in the car because that ball of hydrogen, the sun, is beating down. It pushes through the windows. No matter where you go, you could fry an egg anywhere.
Cori and I were in a similar situation. It was the weekend, and we were trying to find some shade. We’d just gone through the drive-through, and we were going to have one of those post-meal-in-the-car moments.
But of course, I made it complicated. I know Cori can’t stand this. Most people, when they go through a drive-through and want to eat in the car between errands, just park in the restaurant’s lot and eat their food.
Not me. I like a change of scenery. Even though we’re not taking the food home, I want something else to look at. Maybe there’s a place I haven’t discovered. Maybe there’s a beautiful view of a suburban store, or the back of a parking lot somewhere. Maybe there are seagulls in an empty Kmart parking lot.
Usually, this means I drive around for several minutes while Cori says, “Please park the car so we can eat.”
As I was driving, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a shady spot in the back corner of a movie theater parking lot. The theater was still in business, but it was earlier in the day, so there were very few people in the lot.
When they built these theaters in the ’90s, their parking lots were huge. We’re talking multiple football fields. In the back corner, branches from a tree on private property stretched over a fence. The back of the theater’s parking lot bumped up against someone’s house, and the tree inside the fenced property reached over the fence into the theater parking lot as if it were reaching for popcorn.
The branches created a little patch of shade, just big enough for a car. You could pull in and have lunch, have a conversation, or smooch a little with your loved one.
But when we pulled up, Cori and I noticed something disturbing. There was so much trash in that corner. It was as if we were parked next to a dump.
Empty plastic Gatorade bottles, paper plates, dirty socks, shoestring laces, pieces of pizza, beer cans, soda cans, plastic bags. It was the grossest thing I’d ever seen.
In my mind, there needs to be a separation between the trash and the parking lot, between beauty and the things that are disgusting.
Then we started talking. We wondered, “How did this get here? Did someone just have a party in the parking lot? Is this purely environmental?”
Maybe the wind, because of where the parking lot is situated, blows trash from the whole road and that part of the county into this little pocket. Maybe this is where all the excess trash from the city collects before somebody eventually picks it up.
I said, “Cori, I’m not sure I can eat here.”
She said, “We’ve come this far. We have the shade. Let’s just sit in it and eat and enjoy the complexity of this moment.”
As we were eating, I noticed something about the tree branches. Something totally out of place, something unfamiliar, was growing on them. I got out of the car because I had to investigate.
You know that feeling when you know something very clearly, but because it’s out of place, you don’t recognize it? That happened to me. I should have known what I was looking at, but I peered in and thought, “That can’t be possible. Are those grapes?”
Hundreds and hundreds of grapes.
There was something majestic about it. I reached my hand up as the sun glistened on it. I was already sweating from the heat. I pulled one of the grapes, crushed it between my fingers, smelled it, and tasted it a little.
Then I got nervous that it was a fake grape and that I’d poisoned myself. But no, they were grapes.
I went back to the car and said, “Cori, we’re in the middle of a vineyard. Is this supposed to happen in an abandoned parking lot in a small town in Ohio, with grapes growing off someone’s tree?”
It wasn’t as if anyone had purposely planted them. When I think about vineyards and how thoughtfully and methodically they’re created, I imagine rolling hills in France and the sunset over a small village in Italy, with rows and rows of grapes. Even in Ohio, we have amazing grape country.
But this setting made no sense to me.
If I want to go to a vineyard, I go to a vineyard. If I want to see beauty, I see something beautiful. If I want to go to a trash dump, I go to a trash dump.
Here we were, with grass and concrete, someone’s private property and a movie theater and a business right next door. There was this empty space that was supposed to be filled, but it was empty and filled with trash from who knows where. Then there were these beautiful branches, hanging out and reaching toward the sun, producing fruit that most likely no one would eat or turn into wine.
We finished lunch and drove away. As we drove, I started feeling better because the boxes made sense again. We were on the right side of the road. Everything had its place. There were rules and speed limits and designated places where we could park.
Then I went home, where everything was in its place, where I needed it. And I have to tell you, I felt so much better not being surrounded by nuance and contradictions.
But then I thought: If a flower can emerge from manure, maybe I’ve got this whole idea wrong. Maybe beauty and the things I like don’t have to fit neatly into place.
I don’t know. It’s just part of this extremely simple, ordinary, but extraordinary life that I’m so grateful to reap the fruits of.
I’ll talk to you next week.