Sidewalks

It’s easy to mistake them for beautiful, or melancholy. But in truth, they’re more like schoolchildren going about their business as instructed, understanding that that task equals importance, periodically erupting into seemingly impossible angles for reasons more to do with their construction than their constitution. I am using the one outside of my house in Edgewater, Chicago, as my example. The impulse to romanticize sidewalks grows as a counterforce to their seeming mundaneness. They are incidental, necessary, in their way deeply personal, simultaneously public and private, host to what the French writer Henri Lefebvre called “secret rhythms.” They are very minor, utilitarian miracles: a way of conveying yourself, in your own time, at your own speed, from one point to another. Any faults in the path—uneven slabs, slow walkers, unshoveled snow—are not the sidewalk’s. Sidewalks do their best. And are a good corrective to Heraclitus’s same river twice business. You will step on the same sidewalk twice, even if it is repaved, rebuilt, reanythinged.