On most weekday noon hours, I can typically be found walking Canéla around our neighbourhood. The layout of our streets gives me a few alternate routes I can use to keep things from getting stale. And even more if the backalleys come into play.
Like most suburbs, there are not a lot of interesting sights at first blush, but if you know where to look you can find a toy figure of Sesame Street's The Count wedged onto a small tree branch, an empty house that appears to have had a kitchen fire, and a startling number of people whose RVs and trailers prevent them from accessing their garages with their vehicles.
Even without trailers and such, there is a lot of street parking. Heck, our next door neighbours don't even have a garage, and they seem much happier with their increased yard space anyways. But walking past the various parked cars and trucks, I always like to check out the ones with stickers.
Surprisingly, none of my routes have brought me into proximity with Alberta's ubiquitous "F*** Trudeau" decals, but I have seen at least one for country radio station CFCW, an "I Brake for Reptiles", a variety of non-home sports team affiliations and one that grimly states "Nature Bats Last". One of the most intriguing sets I have seen, however, combines the once-common stick figure family with local hockey fandom in a kind of unsettling way.
So, for those of you reading this in the distant future, first of all, thank you! Next, you need to be aware that in the early 21st century we saw the peak of people putting simple icons representing their families on the rear windows of their passenger vehicles. Even as a person who loves stickers, I never saw the appeal myself - why would you want strangers to know how many kids you have, or whether or not you are a single parent? Is it so bystanders can let you know if you have left a family member behind?
Before it began to drop in the mid-late twentyteens, we saw this trend evolve in two significant ways around the time of peaking: the first was backlash stickers, saying things like "My T-Rex ate your stick figure family and they were delicious" with an outline of the aforementioned Cretaceous dinosaur, usually with spindly arms and legs hanging from his slavering jaws. The other was a nearly unlimited variation of the families themselves, often representing some sort of fandom of another, e.g. zombies, Star Trek, Star Wars, etc.
This window appears to have originally depicted a zombie family of four, plus an undead cat and dog, presumably pets.
All the humanoids, save one, have been obscured by large, Oilers Nation stickers, a popular sports blog (based on the number of stickers I've seen overall).
I am going to level with you - my first thought was that this was perhaps an act of bitterness, possibly p[receded by a messy breakup or relationship breakdown of some kind. But while obscuring an ex-partner is easily explained, what about the children?
On closer inspection, however, the sole unobscured figure is smaller in size than the two on the far left of the tableau, suggesting an offspring (supported by the placement on the far right, suggesting the younger sibling)... perhaps the child is now of driving age and has begun using this vehicle on the regular? And if so, perhaps they don't want strangers assuming they a) are partnered up and b) have a pair of children - certainly an awkward thing to explain in the high school parking lot.
Regardless, if I walk this route enough times, perhaps one day I will encounter the driver as they are coming or going and I can ask them.
If, like those zombie stick figures - I just have the guts...
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