This bit of sidewalk graffiti is very familiar to me. It’s on the east side of Regent Street between Michigan and Kalamazoo (more specifically, the 200 block) and I pass it all the time since I only live a block or two away. It appears to read “MERC” and I often muse about it. I have worked out in some of my past blog entries that a name in the walk almost certainly belonged to someone who once lived in that house. The most likely guess in this case is the same. And yet…

As I walked by it this evening I got to thinking about what kind of name, or nickname, “Merc” is. Was it short for something? What name could it even be short for: Mercedes? Then it came back to me: when I first moved to Lansing, the girl who lived next door with her (apparently) single mother was named Mercedes. She went by “Merce,” as I would have spelled it, though as I never saw it spelled out should could have spelled it “Merc” for all I know. If a Virgil can be Virg pronounced Verge, than a Mercedes can be Merc pronounced Merce. She introduced me to how startlingly children serve as a proxy for the passage of time. My first year in the house she was young enough to go trick or treating and then one day I realized I hadn’t seen her in a while. The last time I saw her next door – presumably returning for a visit – I saw that she was a young adult and I could barely understand how or when that had happened. I think it wasn’t too much later that my neighbor moved away too.

I have no reason to think this mark was left by the Merc(e) who was one of my original neighbors, especially since it wasn’t left in front of her old house which is, as I said, a couple of blocks away. But I can’t rule it out, either. After all, if you were the right age and walking by a freshly-poured slab of concrete, and had a stick handy…