I spent part of Easter Sunday teaching my daughter to do something that ever-fewer people these days can do: drive a stick-shift car.

The place I chose to subject a reluctant Kate to this painful instruction was a venue often used by others for the purpose: the huge parking lot of the abandoned Kmart building between Morganton Road and U.S. 15-501 in Southern Pines.

But the more time we spent chugging and lurching around in the acres of weed-grown, eroded asphalt surrounding that colossal hulk, the more concerned and depressed I got about something else that nobody seems to know how to do anymore: build a building and make it last.

When we moved here 12 years ago, in 1997, that Kmart was still brand-new, having opened in 1994. It was a nice place to shop -- certainly a notch classier than the plain, off-the-shelf Walmart farther down U.S. 15-501. Because of Southern Pines' zoning requirements, it was set well back from the road, with attractive trees and landscaping screening it from the road. Its handsome architectural touches, including two big faux bell towers, made it look far more impressive than your average big box.

But in 2003, after less than a decade in business, the place closed, not because of any failure on its part, but because it was part of a larger group of stores that had gone bankrupt -- thus maybe becoming a symbol of the kind of unwise overleveraging and overbuilding that have landed the nation and the world in their current fix.

I assumed the owners would find a fitting new tenant for the building -- a Target, say, or a Cosco, or even another Kmart coming in under some new financial arrangement. Publisher David Woronoff once floated a cool idea of turning the thing into a golf equivalent of those immense Bass Pro Shops. There was once even talk of converting it into an annex of Pinecrest High School.

None of that panned out. Today the thing still stands there empty and forlorn, a monument to something that has gone shamefully wrong with our throwaway society.

Because the site is out of the way and out of sight, suspicious things go on there. We saw two drivers who had rendezvoused near the back and were engaged in some transaction that can't have been legit. The place is starting to look like a scene from "Road Warrior" or "Children of Men." There are scary graffiti everywhere, some of them perhaps gang-related.

The weathered plywood nailed over the doors and windows has been ripped off again in some places. The beautifully fashioned smoky-glass enclosure that once graced the dining area has been shattered with rocks, its fragments scattered across the designer carpet inside.

But that building is way too young to die.

Look beneath all that abuse, and you see detailed brickwork that is still sound. A hundred yards of loading dock remains intact. Brick pillars and sturdy iron gates still surround the familiar home and garden area. A nice flagpole stands in the middle of a landscaped area that has gone to seed. Those awesome towers are still standing proud. The design still looks current.

Incredibly, though, the present plan is to tear the thing down -- scarcely 15 years after it was built! -- to make way for a complex of smaller stores, anchored by a Home Depot. This is part of an even larger complex envisioned for the Henley Street Extension area, though that whole venture may be on hold now, along with a lot of other overblown dreams.

By the end of Sunday afternoon, Kate was doing well enough with my wife's five-speed Honda Fit that we left the parking lot and ventured nervously out onto the highway, where she got it all the way up to fourth gear. But I couldn't put the ghastly Kmart ghost town out of my mind. Can the whole shebang really be headed for the landfill and such a premature death?

There's something terribly, wackily wrong with this picture.

Steve Bouser is editor of The Pilot. Contact him at sbouser@thepilot.com