Pickup Truck Memorials

On my way to work today, I passed a pickup truck with a memorial inscribed on its rear window.   It was a Ford, and while I did not notice the model, it was the type of truck you would see at a construction site with a big steel tool box mounted in the back.   The decal was white and written in elegant script that read,

In Loving Memory

Joseph P. Meena

1954 – 2012

Perhaps Joseph was the driver’s father, or maybe his brother.  Whoever he was, it was important for the driver to announce to the world that Joseph is no longer with us.  I first noticed memorial decals like this after 9/11 that remembered officers from the NYPD or PAPD or firefighters from the FDNY who perished in the twin towers.  I have seen memorial decals in Spanish, usually with the wording surrounding a prominent white cross.  I have never seen them on the same window as a college decal. 

Such memorials are an odd mix of the elegant and the mundane, of the eternal and the impermanent.  When I think of a memorial, I picture a permanent fixture located in a peaceful park or quiet glen - a place conducive to reflection.   On the other hand, these memorial decals are literally stuck in traffic in the middle of the road amid the noise and bustle of everyday commuting - not exactly the dignified place I would set aside to remember those dear to me.  But these memorial decals do make an argument in the same way that an advertisement informs us of of an event.  In some sense, they also have an element of graffiti.  They make a statement that Kilgore was here, where Kilgore is really a brother or a father whose existence the driver wants us to acknowledge.  For whatever reason the driver chose to place a memorial on his pickup truck, his action did get me to think.  I still have no idea who Joseph P. Meena was, but I now understand that he was important to someone.  And maybe that is the point.