Oakland Underfoot

4001 Oak Hill Road

I’m in love for the first time

Don’t you know it’s gonna last

It’s a love that lasts forever

It’s a love that had no past.

Over the last seven years and four months on this site, I’ve paraded about 2800 examples of sidewalk markings from throughout the city of Oakland. Each one included a name of some sort; most included a date of some sort. In selecting them I left at least ten times as many unremarked, either duplicates of what I had or truly anonymous marks. But every one was somebody’s contribution to our cityscape, expressing pride or ownership or just his or her existence here and now, once upon a time.

This mark was the work of a moment, a gesture of something timeless impressed on the most durable canvas available. Not even concrete is permanent, but it’s sturdy enough to ferry a message some distance down the stream of time. Nearly nameless and without a date, this mark goes at the end of my great parade because some of the most important things are outside time. Like true love.

Thanks for reading. From here on out, I’ll be putting up a new post every week. Sometimes there will be new marks to document, but I have a lot of other interesting material.

This entry was posted on 6 December 2015 at 12:03 am and is filed under  Undated marks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.