The Old Cracked Sidewalk

When I was six years old I ran along the old cracked sidewalk in front of my home, playing tag, tripped, and banged my head on the crumbling cement with enough force to open a ragged wound on my forehead. The blood flow was massive, but harmless, and I gloried in the immediate and intense uproar it caused my friends and parents. A towel was wrapped around my crimson forehead as I was rushed to the family pediatrician's office over by Loring Park. My mother considered it unseemly to go to a hospital emergency room, full of shot-up gangsters and drug fiends going cold turkey -- and back in those relaxed days of the late 1950's it was still possible to waltz right into a doctor's office and get stitched up; the doctor gave me two stitches and put me in a narcotic haze that lasted well into the next day.

And then, six weeks later, during another frenzied game of tag, I tripped again -- reopening the scab on my forehead. Another two stitches were required, and after that I began telling all my friends that if I ever banged my forehead again I would instantly die. I told that fib so often that I came to believe it myself. But that didn't stop me or my pals from playing on those old cracked sidewalks on 19th Avenue Southeast. 

You really couldn't roller skate on those old sidewalks, although we tried with a stubborn persistence that led to dozens of scrapped and bloody knees. The elm roots got under the cement to push entire blocks of sidewalk up like a plateau, or crack them in half. Some blocks settled an inch or more into the earth, acting like a catchment area whenever it rained. Even my little sister Linda's steadfast tricycle upset on those unreliable cement paths -- hurling her into elm trunks and prickly shrubbery. 

At some point in the early 50's city workers had ineffectively poured asphalt into the largest cracks and chasms -- the temperature extremes of the upper Midwest caused the black stuff to work its way out, adding another barrier to our already bumpy sidewalk progress; although the hardened asphalt didn't taste half bad when chewed long enough. Sort of like bubble gum mixed with turpentine. 

Then there was The Hole. On a plate of cement right in front of old Mrs. Henderson's house, next door to my house, a small hole developed. And no boy has yet been born who can leave a hole alone. I dug at it with twigs at first. Then swiped a soup spoon from my mother's kitchen drawer to widen it out and see how deep I could make it. The earth was loose and sandy. Hydraulic operations were called for. With the help of Wayne Matsuura and Butchy Hogley I unwound our garden hose to flush out The Hole's intriguing depths. We got about five feet down, with a geyser of sand and gravel spurting back up at us, before my mother got wind of our illicit mining technique and yelled out the window to Stop That Foolishness Right This Instant. That evening Mr. Matsuura lugged a bag of Quikrete over to The Hole and emptied the entire contents down into it. But The Hole proved insatiable, so he got a bag of sand out of his garage and poured that down The Hole too. Then he issued strict orders to us bystanders to Leave The Damn Thing Alone. We did, but I can't help thinking that beneath The Hole there lurked, there may STILL lurk, some kind of cavern crawling with nameless H.P. Lovecraft horrors.

In the year of Our Lord 1961 the city of Minneapolis finally decided to replace that crummy old sidewalk with a brand new pour. We kids thought that was great. Our parents, however, felt quite differently. Each household on the block would be dunned two-hundred smackers for the work. Dire predictions of our imminent departure for the Poor Farm increased exponentially.

But we kids had a glorious time watching the men with jackhammers come destroy the old cement, tamp down the sandy earth underneath with heavy stone mallets, build little wooden sidewalls the entire length of our block, and then start pouring the grey slurry from the big cement truck. Then a man pushed a machine along the drying cement to slice it up into sections, like a pizza. 

Having seen the "I Love Lucy" episode where she steals John Wayne's footprints in cement from Grauman's Chinese Theater a dozen times, I was determined that my footprints and name would be immortalized in the drying cement in front of my house. But the workers, wise to the ways of little boys, kept waving me away with mighty blue collar oaths and brandished trowels. I had to wait until after dark one evening to slip out of the house, wearing my Sunday shoes, to do the deed. The cement clinging to my shoes ruined them entirely. And the next morning I discovered that in my haste and nervousness I had signed myself as 'Tim Troklindson.' 

My allowance was stopped for a month to help pay for a new pair of Sunday shoes, and my misspelled name remained in front of the house on 19th Avenue Southeast even after I had left the neighborhood to join the circus. A collector of big top memorabilia, were he or she so inclined, could probably still find my misspelled name there and crowbar the whole shebang out for display at Circus World Museum in Baraboo. Just a suggestion . . .