Tue 17 May 2005
I’ve been a little tied up the past few days with home-buying and a weekend trip. To tide us over, here’s the first of my five-minute-work-break pieces. This is sort of an extension of the oneword idea. I sit down, pick the first thing I see or the first thing that comes to mind, and start writing about it. This one, from last week, is Palmetto. I edited it a bit during transcription.
Something ironic about the way the tree is braced in place. A natural thing relocated to a place it hardly belongs. Surrounded by concrete, skyscrapers every which way, one triangular patch of dirt holds a few shrubs, a transplanted palmetto, and (get this) a fixture for a future traffic light. Odd roommates.
It’s easy to shoehorn nature into the unrelenting streetscape. Dig a small hole. Whack branches off poor palmetto tree. Brace with a couple of 2×4s. See, the tree has no root system, so it needs crutches until it acclimates.
And here it stands, a bare trunk with just a flash of green on top, propped up with lumber from Boozer.
How natural.
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Awesome. Now I know where your secret bench is because I had similar thoughts the other day.
You just think you know where it is. It moves around a good bit. Regardless, you can’t go anywhere in downtown Columbia without seeing one of those trees.
My team is in fact moving the bench as we speak. It’s on a rotating schedule up and down main street.
When I was in NY in Sept. I saw all the previews of Lost but didn’t see the show. It does not air here. I did see the overweight actor on Jay Leno recently.