The Path To Enlightenment?

I'm standing across the street from what used to be North Miami Middle School (after they stopped calling them Jr. Highs), the municipal pool, and the police station. It's going to become the new Cagni Park, and the old Cagni Park just to the north will become part of the complex that includes the new middle school and senior high.

This is the plaza in front of the North Miami Public Library, now named the E. May Avil Library after the old maid city clerk that kept the city's records for decades. Her real claim to fame (although most folks don't know the story, and the rest try to keep it under wraps) is that she's indirectly responsible for the porn film Deep Throat being made in North Miami back in the 1970's. You can find the detailed story here on the price of silver back about a year ago. http://thepriceofsilver.blogspot.com/2006/02/fiu-film-student-at-starbucks.html

What I like about this photo is that it illustrates that people never really grow up. As kids it would never occur to us that there was a problem with discarding hundreds of sheets of notebook paper all over the walkway. But they're not the sheets of paper that they appear to be at first glance. This in a way is a monument to that outlook on life. Concrete "statues" of notebook paper gracing the walkway forever! And as adults we never seem to lose the impulse to scratch our names in public places. Somebody came up with the idea of selling the right to scratch a name or message in the squares of wet concrete, which were then set in the brick walkways in a random pattern. Up close you can read them. Speeding down the street it sure looks like a mess, but it raised money for a good cause.