To the editor:

The hideous blocky traffic-calming things popping up on some streets are objectionable on aesthetic, not functional grounds. But I don’t mind the roundabouts. I have successfully negotiated similar structures in Europe from Britain (Gadzooks, here comes another one! Bear left! LEFT!) to the terrifying Omonia Circle in Athens, where hordes of Dalerios Earnhardtzakises enter, exit, mill and veer among six lanes and eight converging streets.

But my favorite traffic circle experience occurred soon after the one at Eighth and Michigan was completed, and before it was landscaped. As I approached from the north, I beheld a Rastafarian gentleman seated cross-legged upon the raised center. He was wearing a coat of many colors, and his dreadlocks danced in counterpoint to the movements of his arms and head as he swayed to the (I’m guessing) Bob Marley song playing deep in his soul.

Platform and figure were enveloped in a bluish nimbus from smoldering vegetation, probably not tobacco. The sheer incongruity of this improvised temple of happiness and Haile Selassi filled me with a mirth I can still invoke at will, several years later.

No such pleasures at a four-way stop, alas.

Michael Doudoroff,

Lawrence