Blessings of Wilson's peace prank

The “restoration” of the Wilson High School plaza after peace pranksters cleverly transformed it into a “Peace Garden” was a feel-good event at mid-day today.

On Sunday night 3o seniors (pictured below), among them Maggie Collins and project leader Daniel Ronan (pictured upper right), created a huge peace symbol (last picture) out of 2,000 marigolds.

When Collins openly admitted to her involvement, school administrators threatened to withhold her diploma until she paid the $1000 restoration costs.

Today, friends, family and community came to her rescue.

Many of the pranksters, along with parents, other students and community volunteers, moved the marigolds and filled in the spokes of the symbol with sod. There may have been 100 people on hand for the work.

Today’s event came with many blessings, to say nothing of pizza, croissants and Gail Baack’s chocolate chip cookies, oh, and a minor media feeding frenzy of two TV film crews and an Oregonian reporter.

Blessing number one was that we found more work to do and had the hands available to do it. We weeded the garden, and then a small team went off to pull ivy in the trees north of the Wilson campus.

Blessing number two was that the newly sodded grass will contrast with the old grass. A subtle peace symbol lives at Wilson.

Blessing number three was that many businesses contributed to today’s project: Safeway — bananas and cream cheese, Noah's (bagels), Three Square Grill (beignets, French donuts), Baker and Spice (various baked goods), Rudy's pizza on Powell (pizzas), Wild Oats (water) and Portland Nursery (sod).

Blessing number four was that in the course of digging and scraping, someone hit a solid object under the turf next to the round garden’s perimeter. More scraping unearthed a square of a mosaic. Roman perhaps? No, more scraping revealed it to be definitely Trojan, as in the Wilson High School Trojans.

Still more Scrapings and the crew unearthed a 19-foot-long mosaic of letters spelling “Wilson High School — 2002.” A mere five years old, it was well along to becoming an archeological artifact.

So the class of 2007’s prank, a gift of peace, unearthed a bounty of new blessings.

One, we are told, leads others.