Drive-In to Nostalgia

When I left after breakfast yesterday morning I took the exact same way I had taken the first time out. PA 10 may not be the fastest road but it’s the straightest shot to 81 North. I stopped at the same liquor store to buy the same beer, and then stopped at Bonnie’s house again to see how the yard sale was going. I was surprised to see everything covered up with plastic and no Bonnie. But she came outside to greet me once she heard the car. She was like, "What are you doing back here? I thought you’d be long gone!". I explained the situation with the car and she seemed glad, both that everything was alright and that I had stopped back by. "I was worried about you", she admitted.

We went inside and she introduced me to her husband, saying "This is the girl I was telling you about!" That made me feel pretty good. The house was as unique and cozy on the inside as it was on the outside. We sat down in her office and I told her about the breathalyzer. Oddly enough, she knew all about them, since her son used to have one as well. So we talked about DUI’s and the like, and then I told her about the revival. The conversation turned to religion and Bonnie revealed to me that she was also a born-again Christian. I wasn’t surprised - after all, this is the state that elected Rick Santorum to the Senate - but I was worried that I would say too much and offend my new friend.

But it wasn’t as bad as I thought. Bonnie answered all of my questions, like "How do you know the Bible is true?" and "Doesn’t the fact that the Bible was written by men make you wonder about it’s validity?", and told me about the experiences that had brought her to "accepting Christ as my savior". The funniest thing was how she explained stories from the bible in a way I could understand. She mapped out why Jesus was thought of as a sacrificial lamb and "died for our sins" - in 24 years of stand-up-kneel-down-cross-yourself-and-genuflect I never got it, but sitting in Bonnie’s study on a rainy afternoon, I understood. It’s not going to make me run out and get re-baptized, but at least I’m not completely in the dark anymore.

She, like Jean, loaded me down with pamphlets of scripture and prayer. And she, like Jean, told me that us meeting again was no accident. To be honest, I do wonder why exactly my car broke down and the events of the past few days led me back down the same road - literally. But, again, it’s going to take a lot more than a second-chance meeting and a pocket Bible to make me run up to the pulpit and change everything I’ve stood for. I guess I’m just more of the mindset that I can have a fabulous relationship with God, and possibly even this Jesus guy, without having to make it so public.

So I drove on, the exact same way. I was going to stop at that little mountain bar from the day before, where my imaginary future husband’s uncle tends bar, but word must have gotten out about how fabulous my imaginary future husband is because there was a long line of girls standing on the porch. I kept on driving.

When I got to the Deer Lake Drive-In I had passed the day before, I was too intrigued to drive by again. Ignoring the "No Trespassing" sign, I pulled into the wooded lane leading down to the huge screen half-hidden by trees. Brush that had grown over the edges of the dirt road scraped my car and I gasped as I came upon the rusty ticket booth and wide open field beyond it. The ticket booth and snack shop were both dull beige, matching the sallow grass in the field.

I pulled into the path of the booth and stopped to look around. The glass had been shattered and the wooden signs that hung by chains had long since snapped and rotted. Picking the shards of lumber off the ground, I couldn’t even tell what they had said. Spiders and potato bugs scrambled to escape the gray sunlight as I raised the boards. The steel chair that sat in the booth had been pushed aside from the ticket dispenser cabinet and the cabinet door smashed in, presumably by some looters looking for money left behind. I wonder if they found any. The dispenser itself, however, and the three sets of different colored buttons, each labeled by numbers 1, 2, and 3, were still in tact. I tried to reach in to push one but didn’t want to risk slipping and slicing myself of the jagged panes of glass still sitting in the window frame. Instead, I tried peering into the tiny back room of the booth, and I could make out some shelves but not much else.

I kept driving down into the field, passing the gigantic wooden screen on my left. I was so tempted to drive all the way to the snack shop to poke around, but I worried about getting caught. Rather, I stayed in the path of the booth and looped in and out of the broken speaker poles there. The few drive-in theatres left today offer radio frequencies for the audio, but this one obviously had used the small speaker boxes popular in "the olden days", little silver balls that clipped inside the car window and played the audio from the film. The poles that held these speakers and the wires were still all there, but the speakers themselves were long gone.

stayed at the drive-in for awhile, staring up at the blank screen and wondering what movies had shown there and who had run the snack bar, who had actually watched the film and who had made love in the dark while the speakers crackled in the windows. Then I climbed back into the car and passed through the dense brush again and back out onto 61 North, saying a silent prayer for the olden days.