the year before i entered berkeley high, some students burned down a building. not on purpose or anything - someone just started a trash can fire that got out of control. i guess the building wasn't really needed, so the administration replaced its remains with a grass circle that has some benches and stuff. it was a surprisingly nice space (for berkeley high anyway) and we students collectively decided that it needed a proper name, so we started calling it the Bradley Johnson Memorial Green. our classmate bradley johnson wasn't too happy about that.

the genesis of the joke escapes my memory, other than that it started sophomore year. i recall no precipitating near-death scare or unrelated dedication ceremony or anything; the gag was an abiogenetic emergence from the primordial sludge of teenage psychology. i'm sure that bradley's obvious crankiness towards being "memorialized" by people who he shared classes with every day didn't help matters - children can smell social discomfort like petrichor - but the thing was too big to blame him for. i will also conjecture that bradley johnson in particular became the butt of the joke because of his atypical love for rules and process; he was not the only person to ever win the model congress's "most effective legislator" award, but he was the only person to ever campaign for it. what better way to needle a guy like that than to invent a fake property dedication to him?

i'd tell this "story" even if it ended here, but dear readers, this is about berkeley high, and of course there is more. a year or two after graduation, a couple of my friends commissioned a cheap plaque and epoxied the thing to the concrete circle enclosing the grass that formed the green itself. nobody remembers the exact language they chose, but it was an appropriately flowery celebration of our dear friend bradley in its dedication of this here bradley johnson memorial green.

in the years after my friends did this, i went back to check on the plaque a few times. and in late 2022 - a full fourteen years after graduation - i saw that the green had a different plaque. it simply read "bradley johnson memorial green," and nobody i have talked to has any idea who placed it there or why. was some school administrator exactly the right combination of dedicated and oblivious? had the phenomenon crossed an ironic event horizon and become self-perpetuating? was some unrelated group of pranksters keeping the torch lit? the scuttlebutt among my social circle is that students at berkeley high, for years after our graduation, would trade gossip and speculation and misplaced teenage surety about who bradley johnson was and how he died. if the plaque was actually changing, maybe we were more right than we knew. the student newspaper actually wrote about the whole thing, and while i read the article shortly after it came out, i cannot review it today because their archives are apparently unavailable. i'd love to hear the story of the article's conception and writing, because the student reporter who did it had an excellent source: bradley "brad" johnson, who currently heads the bhs track and field program. the sentiment i recall him expressing in the article was that the naming pissed him off at the time but in the years since he's come to consider it more of a compliment. the charge collectively levied against him was that he cared about things, and the emotional timbre of that charge radically changes as we age. i don't remember how much the article illuminated whether the day's bhs students understood that the bradley johnson of green fame is the same person as the track and field coach.

when i checked the plaque again at the end of 2024, it was gone, and the entire green had been re-landscaped. i don't know whether the plaque was intentionally removed as part of that work or met some other fate. i have chosen to believe that the joke continued to grow so much that it finally escaped the chains of material existence, and that there are spirits out there in the astral plane resonating to mourn the passing of bradley johson.