What do you do when kids keep using your driveway as a racetrack for their bikes? You turn your driveway into a “real” one with chalk. A Salt Lake City man did just that for a young neighbor after a security camera kept alerting him that the boy was riding a bike on his property. Dave Palazzolo, 50, decided that if 4-year-old Quinn was going to treat the driveway as a racetrack, it should look like one, according to CBS News.
Palazzolo said the nightly alerts came like clockwork, and that a notification about a person in the driveway carries a jolt of anxiety until you see who it is. What the camera kept showing was a 4-year-old on a bike, circling the concrete after dark. He clearly just wanted to have fun, and the driveway seemed like the perfect place to do that.
Rather than chase the boy off, Palazzolo gave in. He waited until nightfall, then went out with chalk and drew a message that amounted to telling the boy he had won, along with a simple track. When Quinn came back the next day and realized the racetrack was for him, Palazzolo said, the excitement was plain on his face before the boy charged into it.
It did not stop at one track. Palazzolo has redrawn the course every time the weather washes it away, built a device to keep his chalk lines straight, and started researching famous racetracks to adapt their layouts to his driveway. Quinn’s father, Josh, said the two families had bonded over the racetrack despite being strangers before it, and that being part of it let them see a good side of humanity.
How a Security Camera Alert Became a Friendship
Palazzolo’s first instinct at his nightly camera alerts was that someone was there to cause trouble. When that someone turned out to be a preschooler on a bike, he had a few options: ignore it, ask the family to keep the boy off the property, or lean into it. Leaning into it was the best decision he could have made. And that’s an example we can all follow, really. If we were a little kinder to each other, especially our neighbors, we might make some pretty important acquaintances that could teach us a thing or two.
In the end, a simple driveway connected people from two very different times in their lives. Josh, Quinn’s father, appreciated that a neighbor would do something like that for a kid he had never met.
Now, this is an idea that you could actually adopt for your own kids, or maybe some in the neighborhood who might want a place to safely cruise around on their bikes. It costs nothing more than a box of chalk, and it might just put some smiles on a lot of young faces.