Sidewalks

We call them sidewalks over here. The British call them pavements. Just a small linguistic difference, of no great importance. They exist, the sidewalks, in most cities and towns, and they vary.

In Lisbon, Portugal, for instance, the sidewalks are made of stone, chiseled by stonecutters into four-inch cubes. This is generally true in other parts of Europe as well, where the historic town centers have been preserved.

The cobblestoned sidewalks can really be a menace if they are not kept in good repair. My wife had an accident in Lisbon in 1992 because of a hole in the sidewalk on the Rua Aurea, and an ambulance had to be called to take her to the municipal hospital. We almost missed our train to Madrid as a result. So be careful out there.

I usually pay attention to sidewalks. Sometimes they tell stories.

In the downtown area of this suburban community the sidewalks are, I would guess, on average about sixty or more years old. Every so often, at intersections, one is likely to find stamped in the concrete the name of the builder, and sometimes the date. American workmanship was something to be proud of back then, and the builder wanted his workmanship to be noticed and remembered. The same was true of manhole covers.

On some street corners in downtown San Francisco, the city fathers decades ago had installed ornamental brass or bronze plates with the street name on them. It was done probably as a matter of civic hubris and not for the benefit of the osteoporotic elderly who couldn't raise their eyes towards the street signs on the lamp posts.

On my walk yesterday in San Mateo I came upon a portion of a sidewalk which had several names scrawled into it, likely soon after the cement had first been poured. There were four names, one along each side of the square of cement. Two were boys' names and two were girls'. There was also a date, 1968.

Now, assuming that the writers were young people of junior high school age (which is probably the age when young people would amuse themselves with this sort of thing), the foursome, if they are still around, would be around the age of fifty by now.

Will they remember, I wonder, what they did back in 1968? Are they still friends? Or more than friends, perhaps? Were they, back then, already 'going steady', to use that archaic term? Did they marry, and if they did, were their partners any of the names scrawled on that sidewalk? And their children, would they have known that this particular section of concrete on a San Mateo sidewalk bore an inscribed memento of their parents' youth? Would this little fragment from their past be a topic of conversation at family gatherings?

What sort of life would they have led since they set their names in concrete?

And where are they now?