Right now, I am driving every street, alley, and byway in the city of Tulsa searching for guardrail, as one of my current projects is to inventory, classify, and evaluate all of the guardrail the city maintains, and no one really knows where it is all at. Yes, the record-keeping is that sporadic and poor. While I am out on the roads less travelled, I will see unusual things. Yesterday, for example, I saw chickens in a yard, a guard goat (a goat sitting on a front porch blocking the front door), and an organic lawn mower (a horse in the front yard of a house in the middle of a subdivision eating the grass!).
From time to time, I will also stumble across unusual yard art that shows the creativity of the average Tulsan. Take, for example, this “running man mailbox” –
When I see creative things like this, I smile because I know that someone actually spent the time and effort to brighten the quality of their surroundings. Given that this house is in a blighted area that is very depressing to drive in (less than a half-mile away I saw corpses of dogs that had been in dog fights), it was refreshing to know that at least one homeowner refused to give in to the general malaise and “why bother” attitude affecting the surrounding neighborhood. If only more people in the neighborhood cared about the appearance of their property and the neighborhood, I wouldn’t have stumbled upon half-eaten dog carcasses…
