What's the Story?

The other day, crossing Nancy Pelosi Drive by the tennis courts, I looked down to see this graffito stenciled onto the sidewalk

I’d noticed it several weeks ago as well. Then as now, it sent my mind spinning. The writer in me can’t help but notice that those four simple lines are chockful with the stuff of narrative. Apology, quest for absolution, gratitude, declaration of love: scaffolding for enough tales to keep Scherehezade going for thousands of nights.

I began trying to imagine the story that led someone to splay their heart on the sidewalk this way.

In the rom-com version, a couple had a bad fight during a walk in the park. One spray painted these lines and then invited their partner for another stroll to surprise them with this declaration. They kissed, made-up and long after the graffiti is gone, they will continue to treasure this crosswalk.

Or maybe…the spray-painted apology wasn’t enough and the couple broke up.

Or maybe…

• A tennis player blamed his wife when they lost a doubles tennis match, though he was actually the one who kept rushing the net. He tried to make it up to her with this semi-poem, even though he’s not the sort of guy who would ever do graffiti. She chuckled when he showed it to her and thanked him, but will never play tennis with him again.

• A woman borrowed her friend’s car, got into a fender bender at this site, and though she paid for the damage, the friendship was strained. She hoped graffiti would be better than a card to make amends.

• A graffiti artist began getting more attention and acclaim than the tagger who taught them the craft. They stenciled the lines to pay tribute to their mentor and express their appreciation. It looked so cool, they started a Go-Fund-Me campaign to put the words on a billboard. As of now, they’ve raised 1,875.

• Or maybe, an activist stenciled the message as a political statement: an apology to Mother Earth for all the ways we humans have wronged her.

I don’t know if other people play these games when they’re in the park, But I think a lot about how it’s a living repository of our stories — public and private, known and unknown. So I love coming across objects that seem redolent with story. Some are obvious like the memorial plaques on park benches or the loving tributes etched on stones in the AIDS Grove.

But I think what I like best are the strange, mysterious items that suggest a life or life moment whose significance I can only guess at: a piece of makeshift art: a daisy chain dangling from a tree; a family photo stuck in the top of tree fern; an empty purse with its contents strewn nearby; a chalked game of tic-tac-toe on a jungle gym; a posting about a lost duck; a dollar tacked to a tree; potatoes and a box of pasta left out on a bench; a grisly trail of feathers and blood. (It’s not hard to guess the story behind that last one.)

Sometimes, I make the effort to ferret out the story. But sometimes, it’s better, as Iris DeMent sings, to “let the mystery be.”

P.S. I now know the story behind that treed dollar bill.

Turns out it was placed by Angus Macfarlane, who I wrote about in 2023 for his one-man campaign to rename Stow Lake after one of the park’s early laborers, Patrick Quigley. To advance Quigley’s cause and highlight his important role in the park, Macfarlane plastered the park and nearby streets with copies of Quigley’s 1912 obit. Angus wrote me to explain that the dollar bill I spotted came out of a similar impulse:

At the same time that I was fanatically pro-Quigley in the battle of renaming Stow Lake, I was rabidly, frothing-at-the-mouth anti-Trump.

Sometime before the 2024 campaign (2022? 2023?) I received a dollar bill in change with a red TRUMP stamped on it. Over the TRUMP stamp someone had red-sharpied NOPE. That debate on the back of the dollar bill got me to thinking that I could do better.

So, I had a rubber stamp made and stamped literally thousands of dollars with my anti-Trump messages: DEFEAT THE TANGERINE SATAN; LOCK HIM UP; Make America Smart Again.

Nearly all of it went into circulation in my daily currency transactions, but I made it a point to post $2-3 on my daily walks with Ichabod in the park, mostly west of "Quigley Bird" Lake. I even enlisted him in my clandestine campaign.

Unfortunately, my idiosyncratic, one man campaign (Your characterization of my Quigley campaign—I love it!!!) couldn’t compete with a multi-billionaire’s deep pockets.

The biggest thrill of the “campaign” was to meet someone who had “found” one of my bills.