Monstero! Our friend Kevin, a Beacon Hiller, helped build this thing.
I haven't posted anything about James Paroline, a casualty of a terrifying hostility that seems to plague Southeast Seattle more than anywhere else in the city.
The 60-year-old man was a passionate gardener, a Vietnam vet, and possibly a bit of a neighborhood curmudgeon who lived down by Kubota Garden. Wednesday night he was tending to the plants in the traffic circle he'd pushed for, and he put up some traffic cones where his hose stretched across the street, indicating to drivers that they should proceed the other way around the circle while he finished his work.
I haven't read all the stories about what exactly went down, but it sounds like some young women in a car got upset that they were being asked to drive on the other side of the circle, so they got out of the car and started arguing with him. When one of them started moving the cones herself, he squirted her with his hose. (I'm not sure what to make of different stories I've heard about whether or not he pushed one of the girls, whether they stomped on his plants, and whether one of them called her mom, who then had a young man come out to take care of things.)
Anyway, a young man in his 20s got out of his car, and punched Paroline in the face so hard that he fell backward onto the pavement, cracking his skull. The young man, still unidentified, then left the scene, leaving the older man lying there, bleeding and unconscious. He died from his injuries in the hospital the following day.
Oh, this is a sad story to have inserted into these photos of the garden tour. Here's the P-I story about a vigil held by neighbors for the man.
Anyway, the Georgetown gardener paying tribute to Paroline today had an especially lovely garden.
4 comments:
My girlfriend and I took about a thousand pictures between the two of us at the Art and Garden Walk in Georgetown today. I just posted the best 18 of mine to Flickr a few minutes ago.
Sweet shots!
Your photo's are much better than mine and Rorie's. We spent two hours walking around- it was a beautiful day and I loved seeing other people's gardens.
I didn't know that James Paroline had died until yesterday. It is so yucky. If I wake up in the middle of the night or just hear the fireworks for the millionth time down the street, I worry that some stranger is going to terrorize me or my family. I usually get over it, but lately my urban strength has been weakened.
A friend of mine had a very similar injury a few years ago (different city). Some crazy person in a bar followed him outside to his car, punched him, knocked him out, head hit the sidewalk. My friend recovered but not without brain injuries that included having to live with a portion of his skull removed for several months. Scary how quickly it could have gone another way.
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