A Magical, Mysteriously Decorated Tree that Would Belong to Everyone
 
I went for a bike ride recently on a beautiful, late fall morning. We have so many gorgeous places to walk, skate, and bike in our fair city; it’s one of the reasons I love living here.
 
While I was riding, I was thinking, wouldn’t it be cool if someone hung an ornament like the one above on a tree in some public place? And if other people found this same tree and decided to add their own ornaments (without, of course, harming the tree)? You know, like those Shoe Trees that are popping up around the country—even the world! And what if more and more ornaments kept getting added until Christmas when the tree would be covered with beautiful outdoor ornaments and they stayed on there until New Year’s Day for everyone to enjoy. And what if, on New Year’s Day, everyone who contributed would come back and take an ornament for a memento and clean the area up so that it looked just like it did before?
 
Wouldn’t that be a kick?
 
Of course, it’s possible that if something like that happened, someone could come along and find the first ornament and take it and that would be that. Or someone could come along and take all the ornaments once the thing got underway. That could happen. Evidently, some folks will steal toilet paper and soap dispensers from nonprofit health clinics that go to extreme lengths to figure out how to give everyone who walks in their door affordable health care; so, clearly, there are major assholes in the world. And not long ago, a company in Redding was caught stealing a restaurant’s used cooking oil that they were planning to sell for biofuel. And there are sociopaths, and narcissopaths, and politicians, and hedge fund managers. So, you know, I’m not so naive to think that there aren’t enormous jerks out there ranging the spectrum from petty toilet paper thieves to billionaires willing to steal from American tax-payers who are barely able to hang onto their homes.
 
But wouldn’t it be cool if the yukky scenario didn’t happen? If everyone thought of the ornaments as belonging to everyone in the community and that having something like this in our midst—spontaneous, giving, noncommercial and mysterious—would bring some whimsy and magic into our lives? And remind us all of how interesting and generous and creative human beings can be?
 
And if this happened, and some of the people who participated took pictures of the tree when they visited, and sent the pix to keswickhouse@earthlink.net, that could be very cool as well, don’t you think?
 
I like to think that this could happen. And it could. It could, actually.
 
It’s not outside of the realm of possibility.
 
And if nothing else happens, I had a great bike ride on a beautiful day. Can’t beat that.
 
Wednesday, December 2, 2009