ADRIAN, Texas — It’s weird how economic trends can make one look at virtually everything a little differently.

Often, we long for the old days. Not today when my wife and I noticed a sign on an abandoned gasoline service station on the south side of Interstate 40 in this tiny town just this side of the New Mexico border.

A Shell gasoline dealership went dark I’m guessing about a year ago. How do I know that?

The sign for regular unleaded gasoline read “$3.89.” That would be the price per gallon of gasoline.

Let’s flash back for a moment to the time when gas prices were skyrocketing into the ionosphere — or some layer far above Earth’s surface. You’d see a sign in front of a vacant gasoline station and it would advertise a price of, oh, let’s say $1.89 per gallon of regular unleaded gas. You’d long for the day when prices would return to that level.

Well, today we received a signal that sent precisely the opposite message. We do not want to see prices return to the total posted on that empty Shell station perched on the farthest western edge of the Texas Panhandle.

We rolled into Amarillo a little while later and were pleased to see that prices hadn’t spiked too terribly while we were away for a week out West.

Perhaps we ought to preserve these relics just to remind us what can happen to the price of fossil fuel when we get careless with the way we use it.