Most of us are born with a blind spot. Two, actually: one for each eye. It’s the part of our eye which, literally, does not see. Crudely, I’ll just say that it’s where the extension cord plugs into the back of the eye. The funny thing is, most of the time, our brains fill in the blank area with borrowed information. We never notice our blind spot unless we’re at the eye doctor. Or driving. The rest of the time, the brain just hums along happily, doing its 24-7 thing, and shows us what it thinks we want to see. I find this to be moderately strange, but it seems to have been working for a few million years. Who am I to complain?

There are other blind spots. I noticed one just a few weeks ago. It had snowed a couple of days previously; our city sidewalks had largely been turned to the usual strangled pathways. Everything was kind of slushy, kind of gray, kind of annoying, kind of gross. Then I walked past the gazebo. There, over the entire expanse of the plaza, pure as the proverbial driven snow, was an uninterrupted blanket of white. My first thought was “How pretty”. Then, something else kicked in. I realized that, for two entire days, no one had ventured even so much as one tentative snow boot in the general direction of one of our community parks. The gazebo, you see, is a blind spot. It doesn’t appear on a lot of our mental street maps. A lot of our parks don’t. We drive around them, we walk past them, but most of the time, they don’t exist to us. Unknown territory. It's time to change that. Whose parks are these? These are our parks! Let’s play with them. So, next time you do your T'ai Chi, try it in Triangle Park. Or warm up that beach chair and make Takoma Junction your own Muscle Beach! And as for the gazebo? We'll be amazed at what we can do in the gazebo. Our thoughts should encompass the universe. I don’t think filling in a few blind spots will overtax us.

Here’s a great way to get to know our parks: put on some gloves and clean ‘em up! Yes, it’s time, once again, for our annual Main Street Takoma Spring Clean Up. This year, it’ll be Saturday, April 28 (rain date, May 5), from 9 AM to 12 Noon. Volunteers are gathering at Takoma Junction, the Laurel Avenue Clock Tower, and Triangle Park on 4th Street, NW, to pick up litter, sweep, weed, mulch and plant . From there, we’ll be fanning out into the rest of Main Street Takoma to get our commercial area shined up for the new season. Three hours of intense, hands-on community activism. Value: priceless. Be there. Aloha.

John Hume
Design Chair