Friday morning, on Facebook, I saw a post about a memorial plaque in a park in the Fort Worth suburb known as Haltom City. That memorial plaque memorializes Ally Collins, a four year old who drowned in a flash flood way back in 2007.
That flash flood, and its drowning of Ally Collins, caused to come about a lot of political activism regarding trying to fix the inept, incompetent urban planning in Fort Worth and Tarrant County, with demands that something be done to mitigate the chronic flash flooding caused by poorly planned developments.
This flash flood of political activism soon came to target what was earlier in this century known as the Trinity River Vision. An imaginary flood control project supposedly designed to address urgent flooding issues where there had been no flooding for well over a half a century.
As one decade flowed into the next the Trinity River Vision morphed into the Trinity River Central City Uptown Panther Island District Vision, with three simple little bridges stuck in slow motion construction over dry land, trying to connect the Fort Worth mainland to an imaginary island.
In the years since Ally Collins drowned, the Trinity River Vision, now known, by most, as America's Biggest Boondoggle, or more simply, as the Boondoggle, has spent millions upon millions of bucks, with no imaginary new flood control measures to be seen in the area which has not flooded for well over half a century.
While millions upon millions of bucks has not been spent addressing the issues which caused the flash flooding which drowned Ally Collins.
And now back to that plaque at that park in that Fort Worth suburb. I made a comment on that Facebook post, saying something like it is too bad that plaque is so small it is difficult to find, and to see, once one does find it. And that maybe someone could find a way to replace the Ally Collins memorial plaque with something larger and more memorable.
And then, beginning Friday afternoon, I started seeing incoming phone calls coming in from someone who for privacy's sake we shall refer to, this time, as Carlotta Crackpotta.
By late afternoon I was on a bike ride. On that bike ride I stopped in the shade of the MSU Mustang statues to sit on a bench and call Carlotta Crackpotta back.
Miss Crackpotta answered before the first ring finished. The first words Carlotta Crackpotta spoke to me were "Did you take that plaque?
What plaque you talking about, Carlotta, I thought and asked?
The Ally Collins plaque you were commenting on in a sinister way this morning on Facebook, Carlotta said back to me.
Oh, said I, yes, of course it was me. I drove all the way to DFW to purloin the Ally Collins plaque, what with that being just the sorta thing I do.
Well, after we got past those initial pleasantries I was able to figure out that someone had removed the Ally Collins plaque. Carlotta Crackpotta then was called by someone from the Haltom City city government to tell Carlotta about the purloined plaque. Carlotta then intuited from my Facebook comment regarding the plaque that I must have removed it so as to cause its replacement with something more substantial.
Not a bad idea, but I am innocent of the crime.
So, when I was finally able to get Carlotta Crackpotta off the phone by telling her it was past 5 and thus the cocktail float in the pool time of the day, I saw rising from ground near where I was sitting a memorial type plaque of the sort which should replace the missing Ally Collins plaque.
That is a photo of that plaque you see at the top.
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