PERMISSION TO GET LOST

Sidewalks

The daily trek measures 0.16 miles, or 340 total adult steps. I know this because I recently retraced and counted them. My shorter school-aged self might have taken twice as many steps. At a leisurely three miles per hour, this distance should take an adult 3.2 minutes and an obedient child perhaps ten minutes. As a daydreaming eight-year-old, I regularly took about forty minutes to make that walk home from school. What adventures had I possibly found on this walk home? What is there to investigate in a 0.16 mile walk past the same seven houses one hundred sixty times a year? Everything. Those steps unlocked countless journeys into what existed beneath the surface.

I walked home noticing a rain-filled crack in the damp sidewalk fragrant with petrichor and swamped inhabitants, including the arthropod racing across a scorching expanse of concrete that separates two endless stretches of green (endless to the spider). I noticed the shape-shifting cloud turning from teapot to puppy to disconnected puzzle pieces. At times I took in the houses along the sidewalks noticing, for instance, a newly painted door. All had stories to reveal.

That newly painted door. Why? Was there some understanding between adults about a timeline for repainting front doors? Was I going to need to know this when I was an adult? Did you use different paint on a door than you used for your living room walls? Brown doesn’t feel happy, were things inside that home difficult?

In my childhood, the required number of school days in Michigan provided one hundred and sixty opportunities to walk past the same seven houses, over the same sidewalks, crossing the same streets at the same spots for seven years. On the surface, the houses I passed were unique, yet very much the same: four bedrooms and two-and-a-half bathrooms enclosed efficiently within a bricked and sided rectangle, decorated by symmetrical, double-hung, shuttered windows that surrounded a perfectly centered front door. Ours were painted Valley Forge Blue which I know because as an adult I painted the shutters on my first home that same blue. Every front yard set safely back from the sidewalk shouted devotion to the post-war American Dream. A neighborhood designed around a shiny, new public school: Lawton Elementary School, 2250 South Seventh Street. My daily walk home began here.

The first 105 steps took me past two houses to the crossing guard. I took sixteen steps to cross, where I continued 136 more steps on the east side of the street past four more houses (including the one with the newly painted door), to arrive at Lansway. Here again 16 steps to cross the street to arrive at my next-door neighbor’s house, a house full of people still family to me today. That was the seventh house of my trek, and I had classmates in almost every one of those houses on my journey. A final 67 steps carried me to my salmon-colored, Valley Forge blue-shuttered home at 766 Lansway. I took every one of those fifty-four thousand annual steps on the city-built sidewalks, building stories in my imagination.

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Sidewalks connect one house to the next. Sidewalks separate patches of green grass, creating a neighborhood by which houses were both connected and at the same time, detached. Sidewalks provide a reprieve for drowning worms after the rain. They also create a killing field for hungry birds. Out of the frying pan, into the fire for those drowning worms. Three hundred eighty thousand steps over seven years on those now-worn, pebbled sidewalks. And they still demand my attention today.

Them: You’ve been pretty quiet lately, what’s on your mind?

Me: There’s a crack in that piece of the sidewalk. How did it get there? Maybe a meteorite or blue ice from a plane fell on it! (Probably not). What creatures live in those cracks? When it rains do they escape, or are they trapped below the surface to drown? Why don’t all neighborhoods have sidewalks? Where are kids supposed to ride their bikes in the neighborhoods that don’t have sidewalks? Every so often there is a cleaner, smoother segment in place of its cracked and broken predecessor, perhaps replaced to prevent trips.

More recently, to my walking partner: “Ooh, what is that? Did you see it? What do you think it is?” We stopped to inspect a dead caterpillar filled with what appeared to be maggots swarming within. I later learned this caterpillar had likely been victimized by a parasitoid wasp. Parasitoid wasps complete their lifecycle by finding their partner insect, in this case a caterpillar, and laying their eggs inside. The eggs will hatch and the larvae will feed until there is no more caterpillar. Larvae become pupae, what I saw and mistook for maggots, and ultimately adult wasps emerge and fly away, leaving a parasitized corpse behind.

So when I am quiet, that is what’s on my mind: the world at my feet.

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Surely I must have had companions, in particular either or both of my brothers, though I remember being alone on those walks home. Two grades below me, David was already too popular to be burdened by a painfully quiet and shy sister, and Don was too much older. I have zero recollection of either brother walking home, though clearly they did. They could well have been right in front of me, as I can be alone and oblivious in a crowd when I want to be. For this gift I owe Mrs. Northrup an enduring debt of gratitude. Bonnie Jean Northrup was my 5th grade teacher and she taught us how to be alone with a book anywhere, anytime. She called this Uninterrupted Reading, and no matter what was happening around us, we were not to look up from our books, we were not to stop reading. She gave us permission to get lost in a book, undistracted. It was also permission to get lost in a daydream. I can’t say whether that was her intent, but I’ll bet it was. She gave me a world in which the daydreamer could flourish, and it shaped how I engage with thoughts and ideas, still today.

At the age of nine or so we are on the precipice of losing curiosity. We begin to develop a growing awareness of the larger world around us, threatening to dull the infinite world inside our heads. Societal expectations, structured education, they threaten the daydreamer. And however much I embrace the dreamer that I am, I cannot always find my way back to the beginning of a meandering thought. It becomes a chore, a game really, to retrace my steps. I don’t always get there which can be maddening to me and pretty tedious for the innocent bystander caught in the crosshairs of this game of mine. This game of finding the origin story. Working my way back to the beginning of “why”.

If I can work my way back, what origin stories might these sidewalks of my childhood reveal? A neighborhood of sidewalks, kids on bikes, ice cream trucks and milkmen, safe from the evils of the outside world. What questions and answers do I think I may find here? It’s long past time to do the work to connect those disconnected puzzle pieces that might help me understand my relationship with David.

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I didn’t venture into the fantasy world of sidewalks, worms, and front doors every day. Some days there were piano lessons and ballet class to get home to. And as I got older, endless swim practices. But when circumstances allowed, I was able to leave behind the structured thinking of school and escape into my imagination. As a child of the 1970s there was no fear of being grabbed up by passing, windowless white vans. There was no fear that I would leave the safety of the sidewalk and find some actual kind of trouble in the old cow pond behind the houses on the other side of the street. Bad things didn’t happen to children of middle-class parents in suburban neighborhoods surrounding new schools populated by houses with perfectly centered front doors. Permission to get lost on that daily walk home came by way of a 3 x 5 notecard my mother had affixed to the back of my jacket that read simply:

Diane Cress

766 Lansway

Ghosts in the Cracks

It was me they called to identify his parasitized corpse. Parasitized by decades of cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, crack, you name it. Ultimately destroyed by the heroin that his semi-rehabbed body couldn’t handle. But perhaps parasitized just as much by the secrets of that American Dream neighborhood. Today this neighborhood remains a respectable place to raise a family. At least on the surface it appears so. I am but a visitor now and cannot see nor imagine beneath the surface of what is in front of me, and do not want to. The door and shutters on my childhood home remain Valley Forge Blue, if not a bit faded. The school is no longer new, and seems to me so small that I’m not convinced I could fit inside. You won’t see a single child with full name and address displayed on their back. The comfort of knowing that neighbors would return your wandering child home has been replaced by misguided fears about random child kidnappings. Easier to worry about a nebulous stranger than to worry about what might actually be happening inside those houses, beyond those sidewalks and just out of reach of curious eyes and ears. Or in that house on the pond that had once been a watering hole for farm cows, but had since become a place where unspeakable acts occurred.

His first-grade teacher was mid-divorce, and frequently stole him from behind his desk to snuggle in her lap for her own self-soothing. He never did learn to love reading. Maybe if he’d been in Mrs. Northrup’s class she could have helped him work through that, but by fifth-grade it may already have been too late for David. His needs were secondary to those of his first-grade teacher and I suspect this early theme carried through his life. Through some magical trick of genetics, he was the perfect combination of exceptional beauty, kind eyes and heart, and warm personality. Just like our dad, always the biggest and warmest personality in the room. Through no fault of his own David brought out the need in others to own or claim just a tiny bit of him, in nearly everybody who met him.

He was the youngest, the one who came unexpectedly and effortlessly after nearly a decade of struggle working to build a family. Conceived, as it is told, on the dining room table in that blue-shuttered colonial. Family complete: Don, born dangerously early after multiple failed pregnancies and months of enforced bedrest; me, the adopted middle child brought in to complete the family; and then David, the golden child who replaced me in completing the family. Did I resent him? It occurs to me now that this may have been the underlying nature of our siblingship. On another walk over different sidewalks in the very recent past, I ran into a man who had been a high school classmate. Not surprising or unexpected in a town that people tend not to leave. We’d made the connection that we’d been in the same graduating class, but in fairness, neither of us remembered the other. Upon verbally disclosing my full name, as it was not pinned to the back of my jacket, his immediate response (of course): you must be David’s sister! Decades after high school, thirteen years since he’d been dead, and two years behind us in school, and I was still the invisible sibling. Maybe I was resentful. Head down surveying the life of the sidewalk, head up finding patterns in the clouds. Content to be me, but perhaps with a middle-child twinge of desire to be noticed. And David, long dead, was still winning that contes

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Neighborhoods have definite personalities. The neighborhood in which the encounter with my high school classmate took place might be described as one of highly educated distinction, liberalism, and strong community engagement. During the 2024 election, Jane Fonda canvassed this neighborhood, conveying its personality perfectly. But no place or person is exactly what appears at the surface. What ghosts might have lived in the cracks of those sidewalks of that childhood neighborhood where Don, David, and I grew up? And why didn’t anyone pay attention? My mom likes to say that men waterski through life, which may say more about my dad in particular and his ability to find simple joy in life, than about men in general. But it does speak truth to my observations that most people don’t take 40 minutes to walk 0.16 miles home, wondering about cracks in the sidewalk.

I wonder if the milkman has gone the way of so many other remnants of my childhood, or if there are still communities where a friendly driver deposits milk and butter into a metal box outside your door. I paid close attention to the arrival of the milk truck. I paid attention not because I was excited for fresh milk and butter, but because I wanted to ride in that truck. To my recollection I never did, in my memory only David did. In the years following David’s death, and even in the years of addiction preceding his death, my mind has returned over and over to this memory and to the milkman who invited Davey Joe to sit on his lap and ride down the street. As a child, this privilege David had been afforded felt no different to me than every other privilege coming from those wanting a little piece of him, and maybe it wasn’t ever anything more than that. Both Don and my next-door neighbors tell me they got rides as well, and felt no apprehension, then or now, about the milkman. He was, apparently, beloved. But I have never been able to shake uncomfortable feelings about that truck. As an adult my reflections on this become less about envy and more and more about ghosts that might live in our sidewalks. As I walk them now, the carefree daydreams of my childhood are displaced by regret, resentment, and early pangs of empathy and forgiveness.

Sixty-seven steps up the sidewalk from my house was the house in which my mother had once made us all pull down our pants in the front foyer. An innocent passage of youth followed by a teachable parenting moment, which took place mere yards from that house where the pulling down of pants was anything but innocent. We had been caught participating in a group project on anatomy, driven by a simple curiosity not so different from curiosities about sidewalk worms and painted doors. This humiliating, albeit now amusing, bit of shared family history illustrates the connectedness of our two families. A connection that endures today. And yet despite this closeness--cookouts, sleepovers, and hopeless Locomotion dance practices in the basement--decades of abuse were being endured by those four children. Children who faithfully hid their secret below the surface and behind closed doors, far enough back from the sidewalk to be unnoticed by passersby. This ghost far more real than the threats posed by strangers in white vans. This ghost haunts all neighborhoods. Perhaps in one in every three or four houses, even in my safe and protected neighborhood.

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This was not David’s ghost. For David was the ghost that milkman, or perhaps the man in that house on the pond? What happened there is without question the most public ghost from that neighborhood. In searching to find space to forgive my younger brother, I have always made the adult assumption that he had suffered at the hands of a sexual predator. Frequent and age-inappropriate bed-wetting, early and unrelenting drug use, sexual promiscuity, poor school performance, all suggest he suffered abuse and endured the shame of that abuse. The doctor in the house on the pond abused thousands of victims, his home directly across the street from that foyer where we were taught by loving parents the importance of body autonomy. I wonder whether David counts among his victims. One winter while playing ice-hockey on that pond he took a skate blade very close to his left eye. How fortunate to have had a doctor right there. David’s origin story will never be known, facts are lost to history and buried with the dead. But whatever happened or did not happen, I suspect David felt only the personal failure of his life. I expect he died full of shame.

I do now wonder whether that house on the cow pond had milk delivered to a metal box outside its front door.

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I’ve been slouching toward forgiveness for thirteen years. Forgiveness for his life and the choices he made has never been easy to summon. I am at last appreciating that there must have been reasons. Perhaps a genetic predisposition to addiction, lit ablaze by circumstances? American Dream circumstances. Perhaps finally giving him the respect of digging below the surface, working back to the origin, will let me puzzle out some of the pieces to see that this beautiful, beloved human had suffered. Had felt shame. Had felt the weight of disappointing good, decent parents. Those same sidewalks told such a different story for David than they did for me.

It's uncomfortable to recognize that while I’d spent my daily walks home lost in search of stories and meaning, curious about the world at my feet, I never grew curious about the world at David’s feet. My refusal to give him that space in my brain hurts my heart. I may find no resolution, but I am working toward…something. What I would like most to understand is why I stayed upright on those waterskies and refused to dive below the surface, and why I actively withheld empathy from someone who so clearly needed it. I suspect part of that answer may lie in the lack of perspective that coexists within the chaos of addiction.

Missed holidays. Missed family dinners. Borrowing money, then stealing money. Lost jobs. Lost wife. Neglected, though beloved, pets. Parental heartbreak. Crack whores. Stolen silver. Locks changed. The intervention. The denial. David wouldn’t do this, we just need to reason with him and show him how this hurts himself and the people he loves. The message from the addiction specialist never really getting through to us that the only thing David loved or needed was his next fix. My dad, explaining to the interventionist that David had taken second place in the 200-yard free style at the high school state meet and earned an athletic scholarship to a D1 school, someone so talented just wouldn’t do this, he begged. We shared an unwillingness or inability to see the world from David’s eyes. In a way, through his addiction David had claimed a different life for himself, separate from the one expected of that beautiful golden child. And yet I disagree with this idea as a totality, because in moments of lucidity the shame was palpable. The desire to know and love his nieces and nephew, to be loved himself, palpable. To have the life his brother and sister had, it was right there in his eyes. That last Easter at my parent’s home, when he brough the woman whose children slept on dirty mattresses in his basement…what was he thinking, showing up like that and with her? Looking for acceptance? Shouting for unconditional love? Maybe. Probably.

I didn’t give it to him. Nor did I let anyone else. I made him leave. Cornered him in the hallway to prevent his entrance into mom and dad’s key-changed, silver-hidden home, and told him to get the fuck out.

The forgiveness I seek is not for David.

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Happiness, well-being, deliverance from evil. These aren’t manufactured by an urban planner and a developer. Meticulously contrived neighborhoods have the same stories to tell as every other place, stories buried behind front lawns and in the cracks of our sidewalks. Was David the sole antagonist of his story, or could I finally consider that he may have been tripped up by those cracks? The consideration does not eliminate personal responsibility, but it does create room for compassion. Compassion buried for decades in the milk box, or the house on the pond, or even in the lap of a needy 1st grade teacher.

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Sidewalks crack. No one sees them all.

Diane Cress is a nutrition scientist and educator whose writing lives at the intersection of biology, memory, and story. Trained in biochemistry, she brings a molecular lens to deeply personal narratives, exploring how the smallest details shape human experience. She lives in the Great Lakes region, where she teaches, writes, and continues to find meaning in the ordinary.