Love and spray paint were in the air Sunday evening.
Lawrence Griffin, 25, a UF graduate, painted a marriage proposal to his girlfriend Miredys Gonzales, 25, a graduate from the UF law school, on the 34th Street Wall.
The proposal covered more than 80 feet of the wall with stills like a flip-through-sequence in a sketch book. It began with a hummingbird beating its wings as it flew along the wall, and the scene continued with a man slowly bending to his knee.
In the seven final stills, the man held out a ring to a woman in a skirt and high heels with the hummingbird at her feet. The characters were painted in black along the wall, but the scene had as much color as the setting sun could cast.
Later that night, Griffin picked up his girlfriend, Gonzales, blindfolded her and led her to the wall, she said.
When they arrived at the wall, he removed her blindfold.
"He said, ‘Let the zunzún guide you,'" she said. Zunzún means hummingbird in Spanish.
When they got to the last still, Griffin knelt down and proposed in Spanish, his second language and her first.
She said yes.
The two were high school sweethearts and had to overcome a language barrier through the beginning of their relationship.
It's not the first time someone has used the wall to propose. This fall, someone painted the entire wall white and painted a simple ‘Will you marry me?' message in text.
Painting on the 34th Street wall has been a time-honored tradition for more than 20 years, said Lt. Steve Weaver of the Gainesville Police Department. People use the wall to congratulate, commemorate and propose, he said.
Tommy Lonergan, 23, a student at UF, said the wall gives character to the city. He doesn't usually remember what people put on the wall, but when he drove past the wall Sunday he saw Griffin's proposal and said it really stood out.
"It was simple, and it was something everyone could understand," he said.
Not everyone appreciates the artwork of the wall on 34th Street, said Mickie MacKenzie, executive director of Keep Alachua County Beautiful. Some people in the community call the wall an eyesore, and three times a week KACB sends a person out to check the wall for offensive or hateful graffiti.
MacKenzie isn't worried about Griffin's proposal being covered over too soon. In fact, she said, she's excited to see it herself.
"Our position is to keep it respectful," she said. "Other than that, we pretty much leave it alone."
