You Like Things and Love People

The lights are still on, but not for much longer. Tonight, after 78 years, my family's furniture store closes its doors.

I was a kid, holding something I loved (a toy, I don't remember which) when my great-grandfather, John Ray Weir, who started the place, stopped me. "Will," he said, "love is a strong word. Love is reserved only for God and for people." I didn't understand it then. I just remembered it, the way you remember a thing an adult says sharply, without knowing yet why it stuck.

It took years of riding my bike to that store to find out he was right. My dad's laugh cutting across the salesfloor. The gregarious kind of laugh a person only has when he's doing things he likes around people he loves. My mother's warm greeting behind the counter of the old country store we kept inside the building, the smell of fresh popcorn always in the air, candy and cold sodas and a checkerboard played with old bottle caps if you wanted to stay awhile. Employees who gave decades to the place, not because the job demanded it, but because it turned into something else along the way. A place where coworkers became friends, mentors, and for some: extended family.

None of that was about furniture. The furniture was just the reason people kept coming back to be known.

I walked the floor recently for the last time, and I expected to grieve the building. Instead I found myself looking for faces. That's when I finally understood what he meant, all those years later. You can say goodbye to a store. You don't have to say goodbye to the people in it.

There are so many to thank, many I've known since I was too small to see over the counter. Before the doors close tonight, I had the chance to sit with a few of them and take their portrait. Here is to you, and to everyone who was ever a customer or ever wore the name badge. We're not saying goodbye. Just: see you down the road.

Remember this: You like things. You love people.