Photo: jetheriot
From the porch of my grandparent’s home three broad steps folded out and connected with a little concrete sidewalk that stretched across the lawn square by square toward a squat knobby oak tree making no clever turns along the way. Squares big enough for a child to sit entirely within but small enough for him to hop from one square to the next. I’d count them as I hopped. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve – the first twelve were well defined – but as the sidewalk approached the old oak, the boundaries became rougher. Buckled upward by the slow churning of the tree’s growing roots twisting silently in the darkness underground, the squares became less countable: some breaking, some broken, some breaking-versus-broken. Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen or twenty, even twenty-one or twenty-two, depending on how you counted. The merrily-this-way-forward-up-and-turned-the-crooked-stile. Life is a lot like a sidewalk.
Each step down the sidewalk brought me closer to the knowledge. It had already happened, but I hadn’t yet been told. After a series of whispered exchanges I was taken from the library in the middle of a film strip and escorted along the covered sidewalks of Catahoula Elementary. I did not notice the nervous small talk as anything other than small talk. When I arrived at the principal’s office and was greeted by weeping aunts, the first thing that came to my mind was that my cousin had been involved in some horrible playground accident. It must have been a bad one, even the principal was crying. Had she slipped from the rungs of the giant monkey bar and fallen cruelly? I could see in my mind’s eye an image of her bloody face, missing a tooth or two, and a cracked, crooked bone jutting through the skin of her leg. How horrible, I thought.
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My grandfather’s hands on a ripe dangling pomegranate: endlessly exotic: an apple-but-not-quite-an-apple. My grandmother’s hands cracking open the plucked pomegranate: juicy out-pouchings of punch-colored berries instead of apple-flesh: fat seeds glistening like moist rubies in the moonlight: the maze of fruit dividing like the veins of a splintering mirror: intriguingly uncertain like the far end of that sidewalk.
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I was strolling down Montrose a few months ago, scanning the ground as usual, when I came to a section of sidewalk that had been spray-painted with an assortment of words: carefully-stenciled-then-spray-painted enigmas arranged like some strange kind of hopscotch. Running my eyes along its cracked and buckling surface, I was reminded of a sidewalk from my childhood that ran from Gammy and Gampy’s porch beside a small anonymous tree (which dramatically dangled pomegranates one summer in the prism of my memory) toward a knotty gnarled oak whose growing roots had pulverized the orderly sequence of squares into an uncountable number of pieces. I was reminded of trying to count them. After all this time, I thought to myself, I’m still staring down at sidewalks. My eyes just go there automatically. Over the years I have stumbled across a number of simple pleasures – dozens of cicadas, buzzing, dying and dead, elegant knobs of soil-starved grasses, dragonfly carcasses serenely reposed, wistful tableaux of fallen oleander petals, the skull of a baby blue jay – but this hopscotch-slash-poetry was easily my favorite. One square in particular mesmerized me. It was painted over and over again with a single word in red: motion motion motion motion motion motion motion motion motion motion motion motion motion motion motion motion motion motion motion motion motion motion motion motion. The way the motionless words moved on the sidewalk moved me. And the concrete buckling beneath. The next time I saw that sidewalk it was being sledge-hammered into pieces.
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“Your sister Nicole was killed in an accident.” I don’t remember the exact words but I remember how they were all strung out in a row with precision to avoid any possible confusion. I could not have known then that the color of her coffin would be white-frosted-achingly-pink, yet over time, for some reason, the image of that coffin has invaded my memory of that morning, hovering in front of my face as I looked down the covered sidewalk that led to the exit of the school. It followed me like a phantom as I walked toward the car, shading the shock of grief and the sensation I was legless and floating.
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Life is human-shaped, taking up residence in the body like a crab acquires a shell and animating a human like a puppet pulled by strings. Squeezing the rib cage open, squeezing the rib cage closed, life plays a pair of lungs like an accordion player squeezes an accordion. The force of life extinguishes the candles on a cake, then draws its curtain lips into a smile. I suppose that since the passing of my sister, a good lesson in the impermanence of life, I tend to see dead shells of life all around me. The things you leave behind when you go: the thumbprint on a vase, molded by human thumbs, the shed skeleton of a cicada life has grown into and outgrown, the curve of life’s hands in the curvature of a vase, the head of a headless statue, clothes still hanging in a closet. The falling flowers of a crape myrtle sprinkle a sidewalk pink with death. When death closes one pair of eyes, it opens many others to the sweetness and the rarity of life living all around and it keeps them permanently open. This lesson is bitter but useful: people are a lot like statues and life is a lot like concrete. Slowly churned upward by a root twisting below or pulverized in an instant by a sledge-hammer from out of nowhere, both are more fragile than at first you might suspect.
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After twenty years of trying to re-attach the head of a plaster gargoyle whose spine had snapped in two, deploying a variety of glues, expensive putties and adhesives, I decided to let it be broken.
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I pulled my car against the curb and parked in front of a truck pulling a trailer half-filled with concrete chunks and crumbs and dust and headed for the foreman of the crew. I asked him if they were just going to throw away all of that sidewalk. He told me they were going to drive to the dump and smash the chunks into concrete powder and trash gravel but to take as much as I needed. I think he thought I wanted to take them to fill potholes in my driveway or something. I considered letting him know that the concrete was covered in poetry but decided instead to just shut up and start digging. I made my way to the heart of the hammering and held my breath as a worker speared a chisel into motion motion motion. When it splintered into seven pieces, I reached in for the largest slab and pried it from the earth. Dragging the triangular wreckage, I recalled that thrilling sensation of finding those words on the sidewalk. Motionless but moving, that feeling of frozen motion. I recalled how that motionlessness moved me. Now I was moving it. I was hauling it into my trunk. Did this unexpected gift really just leap into my hands? It was my favorite piece of trash I ever found.