We all have cracks. Some, expansive new breakthroughs translucent to the daylight’s stream. Others, cracks of disappointment; old wounds that stagger us when they are exposed. Worse than the beaming sun in an August high noon. Some cracks sit right before you, mocking you, like the unsightly upraised cement sidewalk in front of the house. Representing the swollen amalgamation of crack-dom in my life. I work at my desk and look out the window like Hitchcock’s Jimmy Stewart onto the front yard and the street every day, and this surveillance would be pleasing if not greatly smeared by this cracked cement rise. Sure, I made a decision to not to fix the unsightly bulge prior to the purchase of my South LA house, but I had no idea it would become my morning attitude barometer. At 7 AM, when I looked out the window and the asphalt appeared to have swollen and risen higher in the night, I knew I have awoken to a pissy attitude of no gratitude. If I couldn’t readjust my temperament, I found myself later in the day sleuthing the property by following the crack from the sloping uprise across the cement, to the back of the house where I convinced myself the whole property was sinking. I’m sinking. I’m alone and sinking and I’ve made terrible life choices. I’m damaged goods. Childhood cracks. And I bought a sinking house.
On a confident and empowered day (although not so spiritual), I glared at the sidewalk’s damage like an adversary, and muttered, fuck it. It’s not my problem. I am NOT fixing that crack. Like the memory of our family of origin, some days we want to look at the crack and learn, and others can bring us to great lunacy. I have witnessed people in a 5150 over childhood cracks, but I don’t need to leave my house to have a breakdown. My nervous system just commits me wherever, whenever. 72 hour hold on any crack self-analysis, please. The path to neutrality is not pretty. You can take three baths or a machete to your life. You choose. I prefer to at least be conscious enough to try and not create new cracks, even though the anxiety will kill me sooner than the next California earthquake.
Other days, I lived in a daunting neutrality about my sidewalk responsibility, observing the pedestrians’ trouble as they navigate the large upraised crack. Little old ladies struggling with their grocery laden carts over the unraised maw of cement, or the woman with the baby stroller and two other kids in tow exerting to push the apparatus up the jagged uneven stone. As a homeowner in Los Angeles county, you are in charge of cracks in the sidewalk and on your part of the street. I can’t even get into how powerless you feel about owning a street over which you have no control. Cars roared by playing loud pounding music and took the speed bumps at 40 miles per hour. Excuse me, this is my street. Show some respect! In my mind I laid down a spike strip and really showed those reckless road mother fuckers who’s boss! I was Rambo for like half a minute until I realized we all have to drive over the spike strip if I lay it, not just the a-holes, and my neighbors were actually really nice even though they chain their dog to the railing all day. I put my realism and my shattered fantasy of violence away, and returned back to my conflicted state of delinquent street and sidewalk ownership.
I could be delusional but occasionally I thought people gave a blameful side long glance my way, towards me, as they walked the sidewalk. I pulled the blind down on the window in shame and defiance. Closed. Cracked. I can’t fix it right now. I’m sorry. I don’t have any money. Don’t you know I came from lower middle class? Who fixes sidewalks on my salary? I just barely bought the house, people. Don’t you see the blood smeared on my checking account? I hardly want anyone to ever have the impression I am flush, while underneath it all is a simple insolence that has protected me my whole life. Don’t tell me what the fuck I can and can’t do.
Some days I would go stand out on the sidewalk in all my homeowner glory and look at the cement smear from several distances as if the imperfection had news for me. On other occasions, like I had a degree in seismic engineering, I would stand right near the raised cracks and try and see what could be causing it. The pieces that met the grass seemed to tilt and plane before my eyes and I was sure it was a tree root. Now I was mad at the tree.
I asked Mike my neighbor who has lived next door since he was born, if the acute plane of the cement’s slope seemed to have gotten higher since I moved in. His parents bought the house in 1984 for $87k. I figured if anyone should know if it looks different, it would be him. He is literally in front of his house, or on his lawn, or working on his car, or smoking weed all day. He would see the crack.
“Does the cement look higher to you?” I asked him.
He looked down at it with a head shake, and a large exhale of Kush.
“Nah looks the same to me.”
Why was I asking Mike? He doesn’t care! He has no clue of the emblematic inherent struggle I was having with this crack conundrum and what I meant about my integrity.
Bottom line, I was being a shitty land steward. I was being irresponsible with other people who came on my land. People walked on my sidewalk that I owned, and I allowed them to potentially trip or fall or be inconvenienced. Then I thought about getting sued and I weighed the cost of a lawsuit with the cost of the cement. No one is going to sue me, I thought but now I looked at my local walkers and carriage pushers as a potential liability.
Oh my God, what if they sue. Now the enemy was on my crack.
I continued to do my best ignoring the sidewalk crack, gaping and beckoning each time I drove in and out of the house, and I stared down the decision: to do or not to do. Life was relatively good. Don’t upset the applecart.
Ultimately it was the energy of the house, and the ancestors, who pushed me to fix the cement. Hell they probably put the damn crack there in the first place because when the cement was fixed and the path was paved, a huge burden left my shoulders. Two elderly women on a walk together with their canes smoothly traipsed down the flat, creamy, fresh new sidewalk. My heart sang with glee as a little boy coming home from school ran down the asphalt path, and I didn’t have to dread his untied sneaker lace catching on one of the upended cement peaks and bam, pediatric dental surgery. Before when I noticed the cracks, I could not see the community. Now I saw them passing by and I felt like I had given back. I found that I felt a new level of peace now that I knew the cement was fixed even though they never found a tree root. It was an unexplained crack. I am elated that not only do I not have to be pained by my negligence of the cracks any longer, but I get heart bursts at my landowner service. I could be playing into self-fulfilling gratification for my great gift of a smooth path, but I swear I think the foot traffic has increased, as if a sidewalk APB went out to the local pedestrians. That block on 69th street east of Budlong no longer has that treacherous stone mound to traverse. That white lady, she finally got her head out of her ass.
These problems we have on our land speak to us and force us to look at the kind of people we are. The kind of people we choose to be. The places we decide to live and the cracks we choose to endure. I will spend a lifetime trying to patch my cracks, but at least for now, I have changed my view.
Thank you Kim, what a fun read. So telling and so very relevant 🙏 in these perilous times.