Teddy Bear On The Line

This morning, as I drove down Vermont Ave. toward USC, I spotted a dirty, rather bedraggled looking teddy bear hanging from the power line over the intersection of Adams and Vermont. It swayed slowly in the passing whoosh of air from the traffic below.

I remembered back from the let 90s how there had  been suddenly dozens of pairs of sneakers over the power lines all over the city  and how I had tried to understand what that was about.

Teddy got me thinking about it again, so I googled it to be reminded about  what the shoes meant and found this great post from back in the dark ages of 1996. Straight dope column on shoes over the power lines

In the vein of the one person who said the dangling shoes indicated that a murder had occurred nearby, I got this really creepy feeling that the bears indicate something dark about the availability of children nearby for nefarious purposes. But I am happy to say that I was not the only person to have seen a teddy from above.Teddy bears above.

I was reading an article in the New York Times on Sunday about Emojis  and the obsession of people to find a way to depict ideas, invitations, signposts in pictograms- really just a 2D example of whatever the person who threw Teddy into the sky was trying to do, right?

Really they are saying, just like the emoji stringer, “Here’s a symbol- guess what it means and you get a prize, or you get a date, or you make the person reading your text to smile,”  and I started to think about what would some more fun things to string up onto the power line be?

1.  Baseball glove- “Hey, there’s a game just around the corner! Come join us. We are in early innings.

2.  The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt.- “Come join our book club to discuss this amazing book!”

3.  Apron- “there is a kickass bakery in this neighborhood.”

Well, you get the idea. We could all use a bit more symbolism and mystery in our lives, don’t you think?