Sidewalks

by Robert DeBoers

They are the running boards of our lives where we come and go to places of short distance. They are the children’s canvas where the earliest works of art are sketched with chalk. They are cracked and split with time, but remain for longer than our lifetime. They are the trains of princes and kings and queens, yet the least of our pets do their business on them: So simple in design, but displaying the most intricate of patterns in their ‘grainy’ texture. Both the state and the citizen own them, and neither can claim the whole of them. They are sidewalks, those cemented floors which lay between house and road; between where we are and where we wish to go.
It is upon these urban paradoxes I find myself perplexedly musing, or rather, walking and bike riding on a daily basis. And the inhabitants of my neighborhood are most content with whatever their occupation is as they are scattered alongside it. They are watering their lawns, jogging by me, playing at the park that sits down from it and all other sorts of things. But I wonder if they look down at it and think to themselves, “where does this go and where does it come from?” For as much as we know about them, none of us can account for their geography, etymology or even eschatology. And while I suspect that the most imaginative of our children may fancy some pit of monsters or stormy abyss at the end of them and the beginning a place where rainbows shoot from, our own answers couldn’t be any better. After all, we take their existence for granted while investing so much time on and around them. And it’s not like we couldn’t do without out them. But, like Robert Frost’s explanation as to why settlers called maize corn, they ‘seem to comforts us.’
According to the children’s author Shel Silverstein, in his poem Where the Sidewalk Ends Silverstein gives a rather vivid account of this location. As such, it is where “the street begins,” where “the grass grows soft and white,” where “the sun burns crimson bright” and where “the moon-bird rests from his flight.” So, this could be any rural area where sidewalks merely do not reside. But this says nothing to where they end. Not to mention where they begin: For where they are and where they are not must meet somewhere in the intermediary cosmos of villa to village. Is it the yawning void of Nordic Mythology where Ymir the giant gave birth to the nine worlds? Is it that purgatory in Dante’s Inferno: Or some Stygian realm at the foot of Elysium?
Now while this is all magnificently spectacular speculating, I think I know where all sidewalks come from and where they end up: Where we are all coming from and going to. They begin when we begin and end when we end. They are that part of us that we see so little of even when thinking deeply and analyzing our own self-identity. They are the first and last of our steps. Like Aristotle’s definition of time, they are the before and after, but not of motion but of motivation. They are that general and abstract expression of why we do the things we do. And perhaps this is why we overlook them so. For, like us, there is infinitely more to them than meets the eye.