I’ve known sidewalks

I’ve always liked the Langston Hughes poem that begins “I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.” The words are mildly shiver-invoking. Hughes understands memory.

I don’t really know rivers–unless  you count zipping across the Sabine into Longview a few times a month–but I’ve realized lately that I have known sidewalks for a long time. That’s been my pleasure the last few weeks: becoming reacquainted with the sidewalks I once knew.

The first sidewalk in my world still edges North High. I played there with my cousin. We rode tricycles and pulled red wagons and sometimes aggravated an even smaller boy named Murray who lived next door. Passing now, I can close my eyes and picture Aunt Modine pulling curbside in her brown and white car, elegantly dressed and ready for her afternoon kaffeeklatsch with Aunt Wilma.

Farther along, I remember a spot across from the old library that once had an incredibly nasty word dried into the cement, pruriently delighting fourth-grade boys. That word is no longer there. I looked for it the other day.

Downtown, there’s a chunk of purgatorial pavement in front of the building that was once Sears & Roebuck. I hit the curb wrong with my bicycle late on a Sunday afternoon and slid along on elbows and knees. I didn’t think my wounds were serious, but my mother had a conniption when I limped into the house. I had to get a tetanus shot. The shot was more traumatic than the crash.

Most intriguing, though, is the sidewalk that hovers above the street near the joining of North High and North Marshall. That intersection is no longer on my beaten path, but I pass by occasionally. I almost always think Halloween when I do.

We finished up the usual trick or treat trek in that neighborhood one year.  As best I can calculate, it was 1965 and I was a first grader. Time was late—probably not yet seven o’clock, but it seemed late—and dark and chilly. I remember standing high on that embankment that night. A souped-up car roared by on the street below. The shutter clicked somewhere in my mind, and the moment has been with me for nearly fifty years. That’s my frozen-in-time Halloween memory: that sidewalk and that cool, October darkness and that sputtering car. Some people have special songs that conjure up potent memories. For me, the roar of a distant engine on an autumn night is still slightly spooky and always means Halloween on the sidewalk above North High Street.

I’ve known sidewalks for a long time.