USA. Driving at night through open country, I saw a pink light solve a problem my ancestors never solved. VACANCY. A motel, alone on the dark highway, announcing to the night: there is room. You, stranger, out there in the dark — a bed exists here, and this sign burns all night so you will know it from a mile away. And when the rooms fill, two more letters ignite: NO VACANCY. The same sign. The same honesty. Updated. I need you to understand what this means to a man from an old country, America. For most of history, a traveler arriving at midnight gambled everything — knocking on inn doors, waking keepers, being turned away into the cold, door by door, paying for information in humiliations. You took that entire ordeal and put it in PINK LIGHT, readable at seventy miles an hour. I stopped, though I had lodging ahead. One does not pass a lighthouse without meeting its keeper. He was an older man with a small dog, both watching baseball behind the desk. I asked my question directly: does the sign ever lie? Vacancy, with no vacancy? He looked at me the way men look when you have asked whether THEY lie. “Sign’s right,” he said. “Sign’s always right. I flip it myself.” I FLIP IT MYSELF. There is a man on your dark highways, America, whose evening duty is making the night honest for strangers he will never meet. The dog supervises. The pink light tells the truth over the empty rooms, or tells the truth about the full ones, and tired people a mile away steer their lives accordingly. In Japan, our inns achieve this with phone calls and politeness. Yours achieves it with NEON AND ONE MAN’S WORD, and I am not certain which is the greater engineering. A sign does not beg to be believed. It is flipped by an honest hand, and that is enough. I took a room. Obviously. You do not interview a lighthouse keeper and refuse his harbor. The room was clean. The baseball was audible through the wall, which I have decided is a feature. The dog escorted me to door six personally. By morning: NO VACANCY. I had been the last room. The sign had waited for me, told the truth the moment I was safe inside, and burned on. Be the sign, America. That is the whole sermon. Be the sign.