Because I have represented as lawyer elderly people who have fallen on city sidewalks, I walk my dog with my head inclined to the pavement. Trees sometimes lever slabs of concrete upward at their base. In other places, parts of the sidewalk have settled into the ground, creating dips and hollows. Even the best maintained concrete is prone to fracture into exposed edges that can pose a trip hazard. Cities have budget constraints and insufficient funds to repair damaged sidewalk on a continuous basis. Walkers, therefore, particularly those in harness to large and active dogs, must scrutinize carefully the pavement over which they are walking. Like most old people, I’m afraid of falling. So I keep my eyes on the ground as I walk.
I have been working to increase my endurance after surgery to replace my left hip. I think I have made reasonable progress, but remain slightly unstable and acutely conscious of hazards over which I might trip. With eyes downcast, I measure my strides as two steps to a panel or slab of sidewalk, then, three steps with my foot treading on the crack between the slabs, then, two steps again, three, and so on. Along the way, at the hour of dawn, birds are trilling in trees but I don’t look up to see them. The sky lightens around its edges but this also remains mostly unobserved during my 14 block hike. Trucks and cars pass, people going to work, but my nose is down like the snout of the dog, looking at the signs inscribed on the pavement. Sometimes, I see the tiny red ants in conclave. Near trees, fat porcine carpenter ants trundle back and forth and, generally, every two slabs or so, I see smaller black ants foraging. At intervals, the concrete has been imprinted with maker’s marks, names embossed into the concrete with dates documenting when the sidewalk cement was poured. Those insignia deserve another essay and I will remark upon them elsewhere.
At one location, on a level slab, someone has scribbled in lime-green chalk: No one cares about a Fourth Street Bag Lady. It’s a simple enough declaration but I have no idea what it is supposed to mean. I am walking on Fourth Street along the shaded lawn in front of the Presbyterian Church. The trees are lively with avid squirrels. There is no “bag lady” in evidence anywhere in this neighborhood of distinguished-looking houses, mansions really when built in the 1950's, and groomed, orderly lawns. The trees are old but robust and they nod to me in the morning breeze as I pass the inscription, taking some care not to scuff it with my feet. Years ago, I was strolling on a street near the Garnier Opera in Paris. On a wall, I saw these words: Perdu - Seul. Cars were hustling by and a bus rotated around a corner huffing and puffing with its hydraulic lungs. My wife knew some French: “Lost and alone,” she said, translating the graffiti. The inscription bothered me – it cast a pall over my day. For some reason, this occurred to me as I saw the strange words about the “bag lady” scrawled in chalk on the sidewalk.
A few blocks away a dog has left its imprint in wet concrete now hardened into sidewalk. I can see the oval pad of the foot and the claws cut into the cement. Several steps past that place, enigmatic orange marks are sprayed on the sidewalk, arrows pointing toward nearby manholes inset in the asphalt street surface, hatchmarks, parallel lines signifying, I suppose, some underground infrastructure. Then, I pass a place where someone has neatly written the word Kettora in the concrete, inscribed the name (if that is what the word is) with a sharp stick when the cement was fresh. The name has marked the concrete in this place for more than 20 years. Who was Kettora? Where is she now?
The neighborhood, now, seems darker, the weeds and vines growing in places that are difficult to mow tangled together in tough and sinister little jungles. Cats are hiding in those thickets, hunting, I suppose, and mosquitos rise like fog before my eyes. The houses here are deteriorating, front porches with broken spines lolling obscenely in front of weathered walls. Windows are clogged up with boxes inside and stacks of paper and there’s bits of garbage strewn around. Behind a fence covered with moldering tarps, a dog barks savagely. Suddenly, I reel at the stench of decay; the corpse of some large animal is concealed in the thickets growing up along the sides of the weather-beaten houses. The odor is so strong that it frightens the dog – her ears flatten along the side of her head and she trots forward rapidly, looking neither to the left nor right.
At the point where the stench is worst, a chalked orange hopscotch pattern covers three slabs of sidewalk. The boxes drawn on the pavement are neatly numbered one through ten. (I have never understood how this game is played, nor have I ever seen any child “hopping” or “scotching” or whatever they do to play this game. It seems that the enterprise primarily involves drawing the field of play and, then, abandoning it.) In another twenty feet, I encounter a second hopscotch pattern, also drawn in orange chalk, but miniature, occupying a single five-foot slab of sidewalk. This pattern has scoliosis – not only is it very small, boxes too tiny to be numbered except with faint hatches scratched (hyphens it seems) into them and, further, twisting in a grotesque way toward the edge of sidewalk, as if wind-blown or deformed. What is this for? Dolls? Insects? Fairies with gossamer wings? By this time, I have stepped over the stench’s threshold into a stretch of sidewalk where the air is damp and heavy but not discolored by the dark miasma of decay. After another half-block, I come upon a tiny shoe, light blue, resting on the sidewalk. The shoe is perfectly formed but only an inch-and-a-half in length. I suppose this may be a shoe dropped by one of the fairy hopscotch players fleeing down the sidewalk to escape the odor of decomposition.
A couple mornings later, I pass the same way. The smell of rot is gone. The hopscotch marks remain and the little shoe, dropped on the sidewalk, is still there. And, farther along, Ketorra is now spelled “Ketora”. This makes no sense. I suppose I misread the cursive handwriting during my previous walk. But, this morning, also, the inscription in the sidewalk is spelled differently again: Kettora.
The world is a mystery. Most of what we encounter is inexplicable. There are signs everywhere but I can’t read them.
