A Moment Spent In Someone Else's Memory

Barley, a dog, sits upon a vibrant, well-maintained mosaic bench, erected as a memorial to a man killed in a bicycle-vehicle collision.

When I happened upon this bench, my first instinct was that it’s a very nice piece of public art, and that it’s a very community-oriented gesture to build such a piece on your property and have it face the sidewalks, as if to invite pedestrians to stop and rest for a moment. It was only after inviting Barley to have a seat so I could take a photo that I looked more closely at the six-panel story above the bench, declaring it a memorial dedicated to the memory of Matthew Schekel. In 1998, Matthew died at this intersection, and this bench was eventually erected in his memory. What struck me quite deeply was the condition of the mosaic tiles themselves: They had almost none of the grit or dusty residue that you would expect from something facing a street. The tiles were shiny, almost polished, in a way that you only expect from something that is being cleaned by hand on a regular basis. 25 years later, someone still cares enough to continue to tend to this memorial. It gave the deeply humbling feeling of sitting not in a memorial, but within the memory of the caretaker itself.