carpe yoko

There was a little park on a triangle-shaped block between my parking structure and my building; the area is laughably called Times Square. Typically Detroit-dingy, but with the spring came a good effort from the half a dozen or so very large trees that stood there. I never walked past the park until after they tore down the Lindell AC almost a year ago as I used to park on the opposite side of my building; but on sunny days you could see the green leaves high up, tucked back in there as it was.

When I first started making the walk that way, I frequently saw a guy pull up on a bike to a ratty-looking sapling at the north tip of the park, lean very close to the tree for a second, get back in his saddle, and ride away. He wasn't a jobless guy on a bike; he was the earnest bike-commuter type. After a few episodes wondering if he was kissing the tree I noticed that he was talking to it, just briefly. Once I realized that, the flashbulb went off and I noticed the large cut stone sitting in front of the tree. Almost the size of a park bench, which also sat in front of the tree. I don't know how I'd missed seeing it, but I had. There was a plaque on the north side of the stone that more or less said,

The Wish Tree

Whisper your wish into the bark of the tree.

- Yoko Ono, 1993

So this guy was really earnest. There couldn't have been that many wishes soaked into the bark of the forlorn, stripped little twig. Besides the cyclist, I only ever saw homeless sitting on a nearby bench, either staring silently or laughing with friends, and they didn't seem the Yoko-Ono-wishing types.

I thought the whole thing, in that crappy but green little place, was so earnest and absurd and anemic that I wanted to take a picture, but never got around to it. As tall posts for chain link were first bolted to the sidewalk across the street, then to the edge of the parking lot on the other side, and bollards were added to the south end of Times Square (seriously, it's not even square), I had to skirt farther away from the park, assuming that the new construction (a transit facility of some sort, to go with the People Mover station and depot already east of the park) was going to fill the block that used to hold Lindell, and that the construction equipment and inevitable porta-johns would probably tear up the grass a bit.

Not to worry. In a day, the workers had destroyed every tree there, and in one more, the lawn and broken little trisection of sidewalks were ripped out too. I couldn't see because of some equipment and mesh in the fence, but I imagine the sapling went the same way as must have the rock. Plenty of room for porta-johns now.

So what did they do with the rock? I don't care about Yoko Ono or her irrelevant art, but I can't help but wonder if any of the workers paused to notice its plaque if/as they scooped it up with a front-loader and dumped it on the rest of the debris, and I wonder what the cyclist kept wishing for.