This is one of 92 valentines to the village from my book, “Our Town Oak Park – Walk with Me in Search of True Community.”
Having walked many, many miles around Oak Park the past 34 years, I’ve become a connoisseur of sidewalks. Oak Park is a pedestrian-friendly town. On almost every street, there are two sets of sidewalks, divided into squares — thousands of squares, each a potential canvas.
I’ve studied sidewalks for three decades now. As an object of contemplation, they are more rewarding than you might think. What initially seems blandly uniform is anything but. Concrete has evolved — from coarse, dark and highly textured to fine-grained, white and smooth. Sand and gravel mixed with cement was the formula once upon an earlier time. Some squares actually contain seashells, the sand in the mix coming from some forgotten beach on some forgotten shore.
Concrete, when it’s wet, is irresistible to passersby, judging by the imprints left behind, from shoe to paw to squirrel tracks to leaf fossils. Oak Park sidewalks offer a smorgasbord of textural and textual diversity. If you pocket your magic rectangle and consider the sidewalk beneath your feet, you’ll find beauty as well as mystery.
Mystery? Yes, because there is a bounty of sidewalk script if you care to decipher it. The initials of immortality seekers are legion, some paired by plus signs, proclaiming romantic coupledom. Tucked under the overpass near the corner of Oak Park Avenue and North Boulevard, Greg and Flo Wood left their marker. Along Erie near Kenilworth Avenue, “Ginkgo Tree B&B” testifies to the former use of the grand Victorian on that corner and the giant ginkgo tree in the backyard. Makes a wanderer wonder about the backstories.
My favorite mystery, though, is the inscription located 14 squares west of Oak Park Avenue on Erie, north side of the street, which reads, “I still love Nan.”
“Still”? The word leaps out.
Who is/was Nan? And who scratched this in the wet cement, helpfully dated August of 1977, almost a half-century ago? Someone saw a fresh square of cement and an opportunity. Something so private, yet so public. Was Nan present when he did it (presuming “he”)? Was the author thinking about the past or the future? Maybe he looked at his partner and said, “When someone spots this, 50 years from now, I will still love you.” Has this sidewalk square outlived the prophecy?
Whatever the outcome, the scribbler felt strongly enough in 1977 to set his love in stone. Maybe not forever, but as close as we come — until the square is replaced or erosion renders the letters illegible.
Curiosity is also enduring: Does this mysterious romantic, in fact, still love Nan? Does Nan still love him? Are they still living … and loving?
Was she already dead when this was inscribed — perhaps tragically and too young — and the writer could no longer contain his longing? Did the inscription continue to console or haunt him every time he passed this way, or did his feelings fade over time? As the years went by, did he shake his head or smile when he saw it, amazed by love’s youthful intensity? Did he eventually stop looking as he passed? Did he occasionally leave a single blossom on the grass nearby, honoring her memory or the memory of their love?
Or did he move away and never see those words again? Did he, God forbid, forget he ever wrote them?
Did she move away, then return much later in life, and come across the message, perhaps never having known it was there, at a loss over how to find her long-lost love?
Or maybe the story is less romantic. Perhaps they broke up years before, but he never quite got over it and in 1977, he left this message behind, frozen in time.
Four words that seem to say so much.
Ernest Hemingway, famously known as a writer of few words, took on someone’s challenge to write an entire novel in just six words. Here’s what he came up with:
“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”
It breaks your heart if you think about it long enough, as the novel writes itself in your mind — or tries to. Hemingway described his literary efforts as the tip of an iceberg, 7/8ths of which lies beneath the surface, unspoken.
“I still love Nan” is a four-word novel etched in concrete. I suspect it was written by a young man, but a friend believes it was an old man at the end of a long, loving life together. Only death could part them. He had a hard time getting down on his knees to inscribe the words, but he had to.
He just had to …
Because the only thing greater than the intensity of youthful love is the depth of long-lived love.
Forty-eight years have passed. For many years, I walked past this square on my regular route without noticing it. Now I often stop to pay respects.
Who says sidewalks aren’t romantic?
Happy Valentines Day.