RIP Leigh Boone

A couple weeks ago I was walking home deep into the early morning hours when I was brought up short by this memorial.



The bicyclist who was injured in the multi-firetruck crash I wrote about here died twelve days later.

I find specific, handmade public memorials like this beautiful and moving. Though they are often not as cleanly designed as the Oklahoma City National Memorial or the Vietnam Veterans Memorial for example, they are as conceptually loaded and resonant. Austinites, think of the tribute to Ivan on the Lamar at 5th St underpass. Have you ever wondered who Ivan was? Or who renewed his memorial from time to time?

No surprise that there's a book that speaks to this phenomenon.

UPDATE:

My friend Patricia clued me in to the Ghost Bikes phenomenon. Boone's memorial is included on the website.

National Nurses Day

Today is National Nurses Day, though the party doesn't stop here. National Nurses Week continues through May 12th, Florence Nightingale's birthday. To all my fellow nurses, we are teh awesome, the bee's knees, the cat's pajamas, the snake's hips, the caregivers par excellence, the sine qua non and other such terms of wonderfulness. Woooo!

A couple years ago at the last National Student Nursing Association convention I attended, the keynote speaker whipped up our professional egos by insisting that we think of ourselves as "a treasure". Being the kind of smartypants we were, my group started exploiting this immediately. For the rest of the day it was, "Fetch me a drink, I'm a treasure!" and "I don't see why I have to finish this 30 page care plan, after all, I'm a treasure." So, this is me, thinking I'm all treasury at least for the next few days.