 Good morning, John, it's Friday. I am going to be talking about sidewalks for this entire video. But if you bear with me, I know that it doesn't seem like it, but it will be worth it. Four years ago, I didn't have an idea for the video that I wanted to make, so I asked Twitter to send me ideas. One of the things that I was told to do by Shaina Joseph was to interview the sidewalk, so I did that. I'm here today with a sidewalk to talk about what it's like to be a sidewalk. So, sidewalk, what do you think? Well, I got no complaints. They accept tree roots. Don't get me started on tree roots. Fascinating. I also did this dance, which, that's good. There's a link if you want to watch that 2013 vlog where there's video. Ever since I made that video, I have spent a surprising amount of time thinking about interviewing sidewalks. Where we grew up, in Florida, sidewalks were boring and consistent and they were all laid down at the same time. Here in Missoula, sidewalks were laid down 100 years ago. They were laid down last Tuesday. So, it's like a weird patchwork and a lot of them are falling apart. And also, they have, occasionally, you'll see makers marks that will tell you who laid the sidewalk and what year it was laid down. Those makers marks are part advertisement, part, like, record keeping, so the city knows who did what, and part warranty. So, like, if it breaks, you know who did it. After the 50s, these kind of go away and so you are more reliant on people actually carving, like, just illicitly carving the year into this sidewalk, which I actually appreciate. Though, not legal, technically. If you look hard enough, you can see that sidewalks look different from different eras, both because of how they've weathered and also the materials that were used in them. Look, it's a thing that I think about, which is why, recently, I was outside of a friend of mine's house and I had a moment, like, a rather intense sidewalk-related moment. Sometimes in sidewalks, you will see footprints, like, people footprints or dog footprints. So, I was seeing that there were these little people footprints. They looked like they were probably from a kid, like, two or three years old. It was just like a kid, wandered onto the wet cement and just walked down the sidewalk for a little while and I was following those footsteps and I got to a makers mark where it said, Miracle and Trip, by the maker, 1909. And as a person who thinks a lot about sidewalks, my- I did the math. I actually did some research on this. It was Frank Miracle and Henry Trip were the guys who laid that sidewalk in 1909. And they actually had a guarantee, for five years after they laid the sidewalk, if anything went wrong, they would replace it. And here it is! It's 109 years later. And Frank Miracle isn't around anymore, Henry Trip isn't around anymore, and that little kid who made those little footsteps, presumably grew up, lived a life and is also gone. You might be thinking, oh, Hank is sad because he has a baby and baby grew up and lived and- but it's actually kind of a thing that I like. Um, I- like, I don't have context to that person's life, but what I do have is knowledge that they were there. Like, that moment when the sidewalk was laid down, this- this thing happened. This tiny, insignificant, little human thing. I like when people create things with the- the knowledge and the intent that they're gonna be around serving a purpose after those people are gone. But here's the real thing. I like that this inanimate chunk of concrete connects people who don't know that they're connected. And I don't think that we're ever very good at understanding how connected we are to each other to the whole sort of system of the earth. Like, people take drugs to feel that feeling. And I got it from a sidewalk. That feeling of being part of something that existed long before us, stretches out way beyond us, is very neat. It's very good. It's very real. It's very big. And I like it. And that's my sidewalk story. John, I'll see you on Tuesday. Oh, hey kitty. Hi. You surprised me.