A person who was much beloved by the local biker community ran his bike into a tree at the entrance to a local park. (You can double-click the pics for a closer view.)
I like the hand-painted rock. That's a bottle of Rolling Rock beer in the lower left corner. Which is kind of ironic, because if he met his maker the way most of the local gone-before-their-time bikers do, he was drunk off his ass when he hit that tree.
And you know, these kinds of displays tend to be put up by lower-income folk. I mean, if my boss crashed his Mercedes into a tree, I kind of doubt that his friends would be painting rocks and arranging plastic flowers.
And why is that? Truly, I'm not trying to start something nasty here, but why is it the poor people who tend toward these displays? Is it because they have poor taste? Less brains?
And keep in mind, I used to belong to the low-income demographic. If it ever occurred to me back then in the bad old days to paint roadside memorial rocks, I don't recall. Hmmm.
4 comments:
He must have been pedaling REALLY HARD.
Actually, it was at the bottom of a very steep hill. More like a mountain, really. Heh.
I think it's because they realize that nobody's going to remember a poor ordinary person (in their particular human "this was who I am and I was here and loved people and people loved me") unless their friends and family erect the memorials themselves. It's a D.I.Y. version of what you see in the center of the park, that statue of the great 19th century civic leader.
Here in the southern Midwest, there are flocks of roadside memorials put out by all classes. One is for a schoolmate's brother, and that family owns a third of this town.
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