Here I sit, on day six at Baystate Springfield. Cardioversion failed. My atrial fibrillation persists, and more complicated measures now appear to be in my near future. “There’s a quiet in the chest before the storm comes down.” I wrote that line for a song this year. I learned it the hard way. For six years, my heart has kept the record this town refused to keep.
On June 6, 2020, I walked onto the Iron Bridge to ask why the road beside my studio had been closed without notice. Three days later, on June 9, a friend sent me a link. That was how I learned that a video of me—edited to remove what led up to the encounter—had been posted publicly. By the time I saw it, it had more than 20,000 views and hundreds of derogatory comments beneath it. That was the moment my heart went into atrial fibrillation. It did not come out for a month. It remains the worst episode I have ever had. The public dissemination of a false narrative, the flood of hostile commentary, and the institutional willingness to amplify the story rather than contact me began a stress-and-health cascade that has not ended.
One of those institutions was the Bridge of Flowers Committee: a private, self-perpetuating body exercising control over a publicly owned landmark and benefiting from public confidence, public donations, and public goodwill. It has real stewardship obligations. It has repeatedly failed them. Its chair, Annette Szpila, is a healthcare professional whose public field rests on principles she did not extend to me. She has been recognized in healthcare settings for meeting people where they are, building trust, identifying root causes before acting, and helping people navigate systems that are otherwise stacked against them. Those are good principles. They are also the opposite of what happened here. She did not meet me where I was. She never contacted me at all.
Instead, on June 12, 2020, Szpila told the Greenfield Recorder that the committee was already “having conversations” about a petition seeking to strip my artwork from the bridge. That petition described me as “filled with so much hate, racism, disrespect, and ego.” It was later removed by Change.org for defamation and misinformation. Then, on June 19, Szpila told the same newspaper that the committee wanted to “honor the anti-racism spirit of the petition.” That sentence matters. The committee chair gave the language of “spirit” and institutional respectability to a defamatory public attack without ever asking the person being attacked a single question. I was a contributor to the bridge. My work was physically present on the bridge. I had a long relationship to the site. Yet in the middle of a public campaign against me, neither Szpila nor the committee called, wrote, visited, or asked for an account of what actually happened.
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| The committee has never once acknowledged Paul's anti racist sentiment LURKING IN FULL VIEW in the ground they govern, EMBEDDED DIRECTLY INTO MY FOUNTAIN DESIGN. Yet they saw fit to promote a defamatory petition calling me a racist. WHO ARE THE REAL RECKLESS RACISTS? THE BRIDGE OF FLOWERS COMMITTEE...98 YEARS OF WHITE WOMEN ONLY...TO THIS DAY. LAUGHING OUT FUCKING LOUD. |
The irony is not abstract. My work at the Bridge of Flowers includes the Pothole Fountain and River Bench. Incorporated into that design, set in place by mason Paul Forth, are the Black Stones of Africa: a memorial connected to his mixed-race children, intended to affirm inclusion in the very public space where I was later accused of racism. The committee then installed an anti-racism plaque roughly three feet from that memorial—without telling me. The plaque was placed as an answer to an accusation that the existing work itself already refuted.
A healthcare professional trained to seek root causes joined a public conclusion without investigating the facts. A committee entrusted with a public landmark used the language of anti-racism while erasing the history, meaning, and authorship of anti-racist work already embedded in that landmark. This is not about a single bad decision in 2020. It is about a governance structure that allows bad decisions to harden into policy, silence, and public myth.
As I wrote in my Greenfield Recorder column of February 9, 2026, the Bridge of Flowers is a public landmark governed by a private committee with no elections, no term limits, no open-meeting structure, and records that are effectively inaccessible to the public it claims to serve. The committee’s permanence is treated as a virtue. Its lack of accountability is treated as tradition. The results are visible. At the August 2025 ribbon-cutting following a $3.2 million renovation, the committee failed to arrange a functioning PA system. Hundreds of people stood at a busy intersection and could not hear the speakers gathered to mark the reopening.
The committee also made a planting decision involving material described as 100% organic matter—compost, not functional soil—which reportedly required approximately $60,000 in corrective work. There was no meaningful public process, no open notice of the decision, no transparent explanation of the cost, and no serious accounting to the donor community. There was only the vague statement that “we found the soil wasn’t right.” That is what unaccountable governance looks like: decisions without scrutiny, costs without candor, and public-facing rhetoric without public responsibility.
And then there is the human cost. I am writing this from a hospital bed after six years of escalating health crises. I am not arguing that a single committee chair or a single public article can be assigned, in a narrow clinical sense, as the sole cause of atrial fibrillation. Atrial fibrillation is complex. But I know the chronology of my body. I know when the first devastating episode began. I know what happened in the days immediately before it. I know the cumulative cost of being publicly attacked, disbelieved, shut out, and then asked to accept silence as an answer.
The stress did not occur in a vacuum. It arose from specific acts by specific institutions and specific people who had the power to choose another path. They could have called. They could have investigated. They could have asked to see the full video. They could have looked at the work already installed on the bridge. They could have recognized that a public accusation deserves more than an online petition and a newspaper quote. They chose not to. Their silence did not make the record disappear. It made the record more necessary.
THE POLICE PATTERN
https://www.change.org/p/petition-independent-investigation-of-the-shelburne-police-department-ma
The same refusal to see context has continued elsewhere in Shelburne. In August 2026, Officer Jeff Belanger approached and engaged me during a medical crisis. I believe there was no legitimate legal basis for the contact. Rather than recognizing a person dealing with a potentially life-threatening condition, he treated my condition as though I were manipulating the situation against police. The encounter ended in a threat of arrest for disorderly conduct. The video, in my view, shows no disorderly behavior by me. It shows an officer approaching me, harassing me, threatening arrest, and revealing a startling disregard for the basic legal limits on police authority.
Belanger’s conduct belongs in a larger documented record concerning the Shelburne Police Department. Chief Gregory Bardwell, Sergeant Kurt Gilmore, Detective Tucker Jenkins, Officer Christopher Pettengill, and Officer Jeff Belanger are all part of a forthcoming federal civil-rights action and the subject of extensive POST-related documentation concerning bias and misconduct toward a person who was once regarded as a community contributor. This is not “serve and protect.” It is the use of institutional authority to preserve a closed story about a person who has been denied the basic dignity of being heard.
I will continue to publish the records, the timelines, the video, the articles, and the evidence. I will continue to insist that public institutions and private committees operating in public space answer to the people whose lives they affect. And I will do so from whatever place my heart allows me to stand.
THE BEAT BEFORE
[Cold open — a lone clean guitar, a slow heartbeat on the kick, no full drums yet. Bass enters. Then the one drops, steady as a metronome.]
[Verse 1 — sweet, calm, close]
There's a quiet in the chest before the storm comes down
A little skip, a little slip, a stumble in the sound
Nobody else can hear it, it don't show up on your face
Just a whisper in the engine, just a hitch in the grace
I've learned to feel it coming, learned to know the sign
The heart that keeps the rhythm, dropping out of time
So I breathe... and I wait...
For the beat before
[Chorus — warm, steady, the band never wavers]
Keep the one drop steady, keep it rolling low
(steady now...)
The heart don't always listen, but the river's gonna flow
Keep the one drop steady while the storm rolls through
(steady now...)
I'll be still in the middle of it — steady, me and you
[Verse 2 — same calm voice, a little wider]
Everybody's got a somebody with a hand upon their chest
A father counting heartbeats trying to get some rest
A mother in the kitchen with a bottle by the sink
A whole world holding steady, closer than you think
It ain't the fear that saves you, it's the breath you take
The staying calm and easy for the ones you can't forsake
So you breathe... and you wait...
For the beat before
[Guitar solo — clean and gentle, patient, no hurry]
[Bridge — the turn toward grace]
And if the drummer stumbles, let the band play on
The rhythm isn't one heart — it's everybody's song
The ones who came before us, the ones still keeping time
Your beat was never only yours... it's yours and mine
So breathe... just breathe...
[Final Chorus]
Keep the one drop steady, keep it rolling low
(steady now...)
The heart don't always listen, but the river's gonna flow
Keep the one drop steady while the storm rolls through
(steady now...)
I'll be still in the middle of it — steady, me and you
[Outro — the heartbeat-kick returns alone under the last line]
Just breathe... and wait...
For the beat... before...
(the kick beats slow, steady, alone — then one more, then still)