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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Vignettes Of San Francisco, by Almira Bailey
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Vignettes Of San Francisco
+
+Author: Almira Bailey
+
+Release Date: November, 2003 [EBook #4643]
+Last Updated: October 31, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VIGNETTES OF SAN FRANCISCO ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Schwan
+
+
+
+
+
+
+VIGNETTES OF SAN FRANCISCO
+
+By Almira Bailey
+
+
+
+Vignettes
+
+     As Pilgrims Go to Rome
+     At the Ferry
+     The Union-Street Car
+     The Latin Meets the Oriental
+     The Pepper and Salt Man
+     The Bay on Sunday Morning
+     Safe on the Sidewalk
+     Port O’Missing Men
+     Market-street Scintillations
+     Cafeterias
+     The Open Board of Trade
+     The San Francisco Police
+     A Marine View
+     Hilly-cum-go
+     I’ll Get It Changed, Lady
+     Fillmore Street
+     In the Lobby of the St. Francis
+     The Garbage-man’s Little Girl
+     The Palace
+     Zoe’s Garden
+     Children on the Sidewalk
+     Feet that Pass on Market Street
+     Where the Centuries Meet
+     Bags or Sacks
+     Portsmouth Square
+     Miracles
+     Impulses and Prohibitions
+     Stopping at the Fairmont
+     San Francisco Sings
+     Van Ness Avenue
+     The Blind Men and the Elephant
+     You’re Getting Queer
+     The Ferry and Real Boats
+     A Whiff of Acacia
+     It Takes All Sorts
+     The Fog in San Francisco
+     A Block on Ashbury Heights
+     The Greek Grocer
+     Billboards or Art
+     Golden Gate Park
+     Extra Fresh
+     On the California-street Car
+     Western Yarns
+     Mr. Mazzini and Dante
+     On the Nob of Nob Hill
+
+
+
+
+VIGNETTES OF SAN FRANCISCO
+
+
+
+
+As Pilgrims go to Rome
+
+
+In the same way that the poets have loved Rome and made their
+pilgrimages there--as good Moslems travel toward Mecca, so there are
+some of us who have come to San Francisco. Then when we arrive and
+find it all that we have dreamed, our love for it becomes its highest
+tribute. And I don’t know why it is sacrilege to mention Rome and San
+Francisco in the same breath. As for me I greatly prefer San Francisco,
+although I have never been to Rome.
+
+I love San Francisco for its youth. Other cities have become set and
+hard and have succumbed to the cruel symmetry of the machine age, but
+not San Francisco. It is still youth untamed. They may try, but they
+cannot manicure it, nor groom it, nor dress it up in a stiff white
+collar, nor fetter it by not allowing a body to stretch out on the grass
+in Union Square or prohibiting street-fakers and light wines served in
+coffee pots and doing away with wild dashing jitneys.
+
+Then there is something about San Francisco’s being away out here from
+everyone else, a city all alone. New York is five hours from Boston;
+Philadelphia is close between New York and Washington; Baltimore is a
+trolley ride away; Chicago is only overnight from all the other cities,
+while Atlanta is only two sleeping car nights from her sister cities.
+But San Francisco, out here as far as it can reach with one foot in the
+great Pacific, nearly a week from New York and a month away from China,
+some people wouldn’t like it, but something vagabondish in me rejoices
+to have run away from them all. Especially at night when the fog comes
+in on the city and shuts out even Oakland, and fog horns out of the
+Golden Gate call mournfully, and boats in the bay go calling their
+lookout calls, I get this feeling of far-offness from the rest of the
+world that is very gratifying.
+
+And I love the sound of San Francisco, the sound of its singing--some
+cities roar and others hum, but San Francisco sings. And I love the look
+of it and the feel of it. I love to stand, on its hills in the mornings
+when the bride-veil fog is going out to sea and the smoke and steam and
+fog and sunshine make one grand symphonic morning song. And I love to
+stand on high hills on clear days when all her cubist houses stand bold
+in the sunlight and the cities across the bay are so close to the touch.
+And I love its color, flowers and girls and splashes of the Oriental.
+And I love its Bohemia which is not affected, but real. I love
+it because it is young and live and spontaneous and humorous and
+beauty-loving and unashamed of anything that is life. Oh, I don’t know.
+
+If I were in New York and it should begin to suffocate me I would run
+and run across the continent and never stop once until I landed on the
+top of Telegraph Hill.
+
+
+
+
+At the Ferry
+
+
+The shrill of newsboys, the bass of older venders, the call of taxis,
+trolleys that proceed all day in ordered sequence, the wide swing of
+traffic on the Embarcadero, a tang of salt in the air, the atmosphere of
+flowers for sale, hoarse call of ferries in the bay like politicians
+who have spoken too much in the open air and lost their voices, the
+beautifully ordered hurry and bustle and expectancy of people on their
+way somewhere, and over it all the mentor of the police.
+
+“Help pass the time pleasantly,” so does the electric piano coax away
+our nickels. To those who know music it is a horrible sound, but to
+the rest of us its tunes are rather gay. On the wall a defunct comedy
+flashes. Hypnotized, but never amused, we gaze at it as we wait for
+the great doors to swing back. A woman is thrown from an auto by her
+husband, and in her fall displays a pair of husky, ruffled underwear.
+Time was when that would have raised a howl of joy, but no longer. She
+hardly touches the ground when we find ourselves gazing at an orchard of
+California figs, zip, the woman picks herself up, gazes comically at the
+audience for a laugh and receiving none, hops with phenomenal agility up
+astride of the hood of the auto, piff, a yard of Santa Rosa hens,
+ping, the husband throws his wife up to the roof of a skyscraper, the
+commuters gaze solemnly, biff, a scene from Santa Clara, clang, the
+gates are opened.
+
+On the Sausalito side, a jammed together happy vacation crowd,
+grotesquely varied and elaborately gotten-up hikers, bags and suitcases
+to fall all over everywhere, professorish looking men off, “taking a
+book along,” people laden with all the cheap magazines in the market,
+smartly dressed people on their way to country homes in Marin and
+Sonoma, a well modulated, nicely groomed crowd--bing, the doors slide
+back and everybody rushes off for a holiday.
+
+Commuters and tourists, most of the time I’d rather be a tourist. They
+are easily distinguished in the crowd, an accent from Louisiana, a woman
+who has just returned from the Orient, a man with continental manners,
+they are easily distinguished, and the predatory red-capped porters know
+them well. We are wistfully sorry to be going only to Oakland, we long
+to go out on the Main Line, the out-leading, mile-wandering, venturesome
+Main Line. Reluctantly we turn to where duty and necessity calls us
+ignominiously to the electric suburban.
+
+The first sight of San Francisco. “Ah, this is San Francisco!” The
+shrill of newsboys, the bass of older venders, the flash of electric
+signs. Do you prefer “Camels”, “Chesterfields” or “Fatimas”? the call
+of taxis, invitations to hotel buses, the wide sweep of traffic on the
+Embarcadero--“So this is San Francisco.”
+
+
+
+
+The Union-Street Car
+
+
+It is surprising how many people patronize the shabby little thing. But
+then it waits right where those who leave the ferry may see it first as
+though it were the most important car in town, and I have a fancy
+the big cars humor it a bit and give it first place. Besides, it goes
+anywhere in the city, Chinatown, the Hall of Justice, the Chamber of
+Commerce, the Barbary Coast, St. Francis Church--sinners, saints and
+merchants may travel its way--Portsmouth Square, Telegraph Hill, Little
+Italy, Russian Hill, Automobile Row, Fillmore street, the Presidio and
+I expect with a little coaxing it would switch about and run over to
+the Mission. It has actually been known on stormy nights to take its
+constituents up the side streets to their very doors.
+
+It is a surprising little boat which looks like nothing more than a bug
+crawling up the backs of the hills with its antenna of khaki-wound legs
+sticking out fore and aft. Those who have traveled in Ireland tell
+us that it is much like the jaunting cars, and it is not unlike the
+Toomerville Trolley.
+
+One night I set out to find the little thing to take me home. I was in
+a strange part of the city and when my friends told me to get on and get
+off and get on again I did as I was told. With blind faith I told the
+conductors to put me off and they did. I continued in this way until
+long after midnight when I found myself at a lonely corner with no one
+in sight. I waited and waited and was getting nervous when I spied a
+blue uniform. I looked sharply to see if he were a motorman, a fireman
+or an officer from the Presidio. I am careful about these matters since
+last summer when I was coming North on the President, and asked a naval
+officer for some ice water. I rushed up to him and told him, which was
+true, that it was the first time I had ever seen a policeman when I
+wanted one. This led him into a defense of the San Francisco police,
+which I told him was quite unnecessary with me for I thought them the
+finest policemen in the world, probably because they are so Irish.
+
+“Irish,” said he with a twinkle, “I’m not Irish.”
+
+We chatted awhile until the Union street car came along, and then
+that policeman who said he wasn’t Irish leaned over and whispered
+confidentially, “If you miss this car, there’ll be another.” I suppose
+they get lonesome.
+
+You see how I am wandering away from my subject. That is because I
+followed the Union street car. It switches from subject to subject just
+like that. It begins with the wonderful retail markets of San Francisco,
+and then changes abruptly to all sorts of sociological problems, then
+before we know it gives us a beautiful marine view, and then drops us
+down where the proletariat lives, then up to the homes of the rich and
+mighty, and ends in the military.
+
+Everyone should sight-see by the little Union street car.
+
+
+
+
+The Latin Meets the Oriental
+
+
+In that spot where Chinatown merges into the Latin quarter there must
+be, I think, a Director of Delightful Situations who holds dominion
+there. For instance, can you imagine anything more subtle than a group
+of large fat women haranguing, in Italian-American, a poor thin Chinaman
+over some bargains in vegetables?
+
+In a place which marks the line of cleavage between the two quarters is
+a picture store containing in its window religious pictures, enlarged
+family photographs of Filipinos, and, of course, views of the Point
+Lobos cypress. There is something very appealing about that window.
+Pictures of Jesus, no matter how lurid they are, never fall short of
+dignity. And it seems not at all incongruous that He should be there in
+the midst of all those strange human contacts.
+
+There are not only contacts between the Latin and the Oriental, but
+anything unusual may come to light in that particular neighborhood.
+A buff cochin rooster was wandering about the street the other day.
+Stepping high and picking up choice tidbits and showing off before his
+harem of hens who peeked at him from their boxes, he strutted about
+exactly as though he had been in his own Petaluma barnyard.
+
+One day I saw an enormous negro running through the streets with a piece
+of new, green felt bound around his stomach. Now why should a huge
+negro run through the street with a piece of new green felt around his
+stomach? No one knows. And another time a small Chinese maiden bumped
+into me because she was so absorbed in that great American institution,
+the funny sheet.
+
+On one of those side streets, in there somewhere, one of those streets
+untoured by tourists, I saw some Chinese boys, dressed in American “Boss
+of the Road” unionalls, playing baseball and calling the call of Babe
+Ruth in sing-song Chinese. Then near them was an empty lot and what do
+you suppose it was filled with? Scotch thistles, and edged with wild
+corn flowers. Even Nature enters into the fun.
+
+There is a story of an Italian who went through the streets somewhere on
+Leavenworth, calling, “Nica fresha flowers,” and from the opposite side
+of the street a Chinaman with flowers would call, “Samee over here.”
+ All went well until the Chinaman began to outsell the other, when the
+Italian remonstrated. “Yella for yourself, see,” he said, to which the
+Chinaman answered, “Go to hellee,” and went on as before.
+
+This story was told to me by very reliable eye witnesses. The buff
+cochin rooster and the huge negro and all the others I saw myself. And
+many other strange things which I have not room to write, I saw in that
+spot where Chinatown merges into the Latin quarter.
+
+
+
+
+The Pepper and Salt Man
+
+
+He was a man, I should say about sixty years old, a most uninteresting
+age, and a homely, weather-beaten fellow too, when you stopped to look
+at him. His suit was pepper-and-salt, and he was just like his suit.
+Good as gold, I have no doubt, a roomer of whom his landlady could say:
+“He comes and he goes and is never a speck of trouble.”
+
+Still, he might have been as good as Saint Anthony but no one would ever
+have noticed him except for what happened. What happened wasn’t so much
+either but it was enough to illumine that dun, common-place man so that
+everyone in the side-seating trolley was suddenly aware of his presence.
+What happened was ten months old and was a girl.
+
+A regular girl, one hundred per cent feminine. One could tell just by
+the way she wore her clothes, by her daintiness, by the tilt of her
+bonnet and by the way smiled out from under it. I can’t describe a
+baby girl any more than I describe a sunset or moonlight or any of the
+wonders of God--I can only say that she was everything that a baby girl
+should have been.
+
+When she entered with her mother we all edged and crowded over but the
+pepper-and-salt man won. Down she sat close beside him. Then you should
+have seen that man, the foolish, old fellow. He turned toward her; he
+beamed; he mentally devoured her; he never took his eyes off her long
+enough to wink.
+
+When she seemed about to turn her restlessly bobbing head toward him,
+his hands moved and the strong muscles of his face worked in excitement.
+Then, when she smiled his way and for an instant there was a flash of
+tiny, milk teeth, that man, the old silly, made the most dreadful facial
+contortion, something between a wink, a smile, a booh and a grimace.
+
+Then when she turned from him he sat there eating her up. I saw him
+look reverently at her exquisite hands and at the awkward little legs
+sticking out straight ahead. When her mother arranged her ruffles he
+watched every move--absorbed. Then he would wait eager, hoping and
+praying for her to smile his way again...
+
+Why, I was waiting for her smile too and so was every one of the staid
+and grown-up people in the car. I don’t know when we would ever have
+come out from the spell of that ten-months-old baby girl if just then
+the conductor had not called out reproachfully--“Central Avenue--Central
+Avenue.” Then the pepper-and-salt man jumped and looked nervously out
+and rushed for the door. I, myself, had to walk back two blocks and when
+I turned at my corner he was still going back to his street.
+
+
+
+
+The Bay on Sunday Morning
+
+
+Perhaps to go to Fort Mason on a sunny Sunday morning, that beautiful
+relaxed moment of the whole week, and there to sit with others who have
+no autos to go gallivanting in, and to sit idly gazing off at the bay.
+That’s not bad. To read a little and doze a bit, but mostly to gaze out
+to sea and dream.
+
+A big foreign steamer in port, perhaps a Scandinavian boat, inert,
+enormous, helpless, while the little tugs chatter, around it and finally
+get hold of it, and tug it slowly around with its nose pointing out to
+sea. Lumber schooners come in slowly and rhythmically, long and low and
+clean. The Vallejo boat, looking like a rocking horse, goes importantly
+chugging off toward Mare Island. It’s hard to read a book with so going
+on out there.
+
+Sunday morning, blessed play time, there is a fellow in a green canoe,
+and the muscles of his body play into the movement of the waves until he
+and his green canoe and the white capped waves are all one motif of
+the whole symphony. Men play around the yacht club like a lot of school
+boys, and now--“Shoot,” they push a long slim racer into the water.
+Dainty white yachts go dipping to the waves and seem like lovely young
+girls in among the sturdier boats.
+
+Now the fishermen come in from their night’s work, making music all in
+an orderly procession, and every boat of them a brilliant blue inside.
+I’d like to catch a Maine fisherman allowing color in his boat, like a
+“dago” or a “wop.”
+
+Over all the swing and dip and rhythm of the sea gulls. How beautifully
+they accent the movement of the symphony, like the baton of some great
+leader--this great beautiful Sunday morning symphony.
+
+Then there is Alcatraz. Oh, Alcatraz, why should they have placed a
+prison there as a monument to men’s failure to order their lives
+in harmony with nature. Alcatraz, most beautiful island in the most
+beautiful bay, you sound an ugly, sinister, most unhappy undertone in
+the morning’s symphony.
+
+Still it is a symphony. A symphony of San Francisco Bay. Why shouldn’t
+the composers put it into music. We’re sick of the song of the huntsman
+by the brasses, the strings and the wood instruments. With Whitman we
+exclaim: “Come, Muse, migrate from Aeonia,” and come out here to the
+West, and conserve the symphony of the bay which is already composed and
+waiting.
+
+And for the argument, the overture, the prelude, there could be a
+sailing schooner with sails all set coming into the Golden Gate, in the
+full brilliant sunlight, or mysteriously through a fog, or against a
+sunset sky. It should be “full and by” like that beautiful painting by
+Coulter in the stock exchange of the Merchants’ Building.
+
+Symphony of San Francisco Bay, boom of fog horns, calls and answers
+of the ferries, chug of the fishermen’s boats, twink of lights in the
+harbor at night, rhythm of sea gulls, and the brooding fog to soften it
+all. “Come, Muse, migrate from Aeonia.”
+
+
+
+
+Safe on the Sidewalk
+
+
+Are there others, I wonder, who feel as I do about crossing the street?
+There must be. Now I, when I cross, say Market street at Third, I run. I
+take my life and my bundles in my hand and run, darting swift glances to
+the left and to the right. It looks “hick.” I know it looks “hick.” And
+I care. But I prefer to be alive and countrified than sophisticated in
+an ambulance and so I run.
+
+At corners, too. I think corners are worse. For there the machines may
+turn around and chase me, which they often do. It’s a horrible feeling.
+
+There must be others who feel as I do about crossing the street, but
+they never betray it. I watch to see and when they cross, they just
+cross--that’s all. Not with nonchalance exactly, but with ease and
+assurance. Once I actually saw a man, a native son, I’m sure, roll a
+cigarette as he crossed at a point where even the traffic cop looked
+nervous.
+
+No one ever gets killed or even injured. But always everybody is getting
+almost killed and almost injured. They like it. It’s a sort of sport.
+I’ve noticed it more since the city’s gone dry. The game is, if you are
+walking, to see how close to a machine you can come and not hit it.
+
+Street cars, machines and people all go straight ahead and they all come
+out right. It’s the only city where it’s done with such abandon. They
+never stop for anything except taxis--not even fire engines.
+
+The secret of it is, I think, that no one ever hesitates. This is
+understood by all San Franciscans--that, no one is ever going to
+hesitate. That’s why there are no accidents. It’s the unexpected in
+people that makes disasters and creates a demand for traffic cops.
+
+I try to cross the street as others cross. I choose a chalk mark and,
+pretending I am a native daughter, launch out. I get on fine--suddenly
+a monster machine is on me. Or would be if I did not jump back. I
+shouldn’t have jumped back it seems. But how was I to know? In the
+jaws of death you don’t reason, you jump. In jumping back I hit another
+machine and it stops. And that stops a street car. That stops something
+else. And in a minute Market street, the famous Market street, is all
+balled up because I jumped back. Drivers, red in the face, swear at me,
+not because they are cross, but scared-more scared than I.
+
+Next time I am more careful. I look to the traffic cop for attention
+but, being a handsome man, he thinks I’m trying to flirt. Policemen
+should be homely. So I wait until the street is entirely empty. I wait a
+long time--it is empty--I run like a steer--and suddenly out of nowhere
+a machine is yelling at me individually and I know no more until,
+breathless and red, I reach the haven of the sidewalk.
+
+Once I heard a horrible story of a man who lost control of his machine
+and ran up on to the sidewalk.
+
+
+
+
+Port O’Missing Men
+
+
+They say that San Francisco is known all over as the Port o’ Missing
+Men. That it is a city where a man may lose himself if he chooses, and
+that by the same token it is a good place to look for “my wandering
+boy tonight.” I can believe all this especially on Third street. Third
+street should be called by some other name or it should have a nickname.
+If it were in Seattle it would be known as “skid row.” Third street
+doesn’t describe it at all.
+
+When I see a lot of men like that, wanderers, family men out of work,
+vagabonds, nobodies, somebodies, “rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief;
+doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief,” I always get to thinking how once each
+one was a tiny baby in a thin white dress, and how before that each
+one of them was born of a woman. If I could ever forget that, I could
+perhaps sometimes call men “a lot of cattle.” Come to think of it, it
+is men who call other men “cattle.” At any rate, I like to think that no
+woman would ever see men as less than the sons of mothers.
+
+The Port o’ Missing Men is like the Port of San Francisco, and these men
+are like boats in from a foreign port, tramp steamers some of them, out
+of nowhere, going nowhere, no baggage, no traditions, men who’ll never
+get lost because they are on their way to Nowhere.
+
+Yet, the majority of these men are going to some place, but where I
+do not know. What do they talk about in groups down there, tall, young
+fellows and strong middle-aged men and reminiscent, old ones down in
+the Port o’ Missing Men? If they’re out of work where do they sleep at
+night, and what do they have to eat? And have they any women folks?
+
+Not all kinds of men are down there, but many kinds. There are Mexicans,
+Sinn Feiners, old American stock, and once in awhile a venturesome
+Yankee. There are lumberjacks in from the North, and Chinamen in
+shuffling slippers, and philosophers and Swedes, half-breeds and just
+plain men. Some are Vagabonds who can’t help their roving, and others
+are very tired and would like to lie over in port for or a long spell.
+There are Italians, and Portuguese, and many Greeks, and turbaned
+Hindus, tall and skinny, always traveling in pairs like nuns. Sometimes
+the Port is fairly crowded.
+
+New England is a section of the country where men leave home, and I
+have heard mothers sing with tears in their voices: “Oh, where is my
+wandering boy tonight?” On Third street down at the Port o’ Missing Men,
+I have a fancy that I would like to write back to all those mothers that
+here are their boys. But, after all, what good would that do, for who
+can tell which is which?
+
+
+
+
+Market St. Scintillations
+
+
+Oh, the things our eyes discover as we walk along on Market street. Such
+a medley--infinite, incongruous, comical, pathetic, motley and sublime.
+
+Harding in a window with “pure buttermilk.” He’ll be in more difficult
+situations before he is done, I’m thinking. An electric fan above him
+that keeps the buttermilk “pure” and flies the American flag in crepe
+paper.
+
+“Crabs to take home.” They are freshly cooked, very large and forty
+cents apiece. I decide that some I shall really buy one and take it home
+when I confronted with the fact that “All Hair Goods Must Be Sold.” Why,
+I wonder. Why must they be sold? And here are “Eggs any style,” so close
+to the hair goods that I immediately visualize them as marcelled “style”
+ and pompadoured.
+
+“Shoes Drastically Reduced.” It is the truth. The Oxfords I wear are
+reduced by a drastic five dollars. Well, I couldn’t go barefooted, I
+comfort myself and hurry on.
+
+A shooting gallery and a man standing there trying to make up his mind
+to try it. A second’s glimpse of him and all that he is is revealed.
+One knows immediately that his favorite song is “My Bonnie Lies Over the
+Ocean,” and that his ideal man is Governor Allen and that he is on his
+way to spend his “remaining days” with his sister Lottie in Los Angeles.
+
+Who would eat “stewed tripe Spanish.” Someone must or they wouldn’t
+advertise it on the outside of he restaurant. Well, it takes all sorts
+of people to make a world. Probably the man who would order “stewed
+tripe Spanish” wouldn’t touch an alligator pear salad. To him alligator
+pears taste exactly like lard. To the person who wouldn’t eat “stewed
+tripe Spanish” they are a delicacy.
+
+A crowd around a window. On your tip-toes to see. It’s that fascinating
+Lilliputian with a beard and electric bowels who stands in drug store
+windows and administers corn cure to his own toes with a smile.
+
+The professional window shopper is a vagabond at heart--a loiterer
+by nature. Here is one gazing in a photographer’s window to discover
+someone he knows. These two are not professionals though but a spring
+couple looking in furniture windows for nest material. And sailors
+wandering about, nothing but kiddies, lonesome looking and no doubt
+wishing we were at War again and hospitable once more.
+
+Here is a “Pershing Market” and a “Grant Market,” beside it. There’s a
+lot of that in San Francisco. Is there an “Imperial Doughnut?” Up goes a
+“Supreme Doughnut” next door. It’s the spirit of “I’ll go you one better
+every time.” It’s the spirit of Market street.
+
+
+
+
+Cafeterias
+
+
+This is not to hurt the feelings of anyone, for some people are very
+sensitive about cafeterias. They are cafeteria wise, they have a
+cafeteria class consciousness. Such people are to be admired. They
+have accurate minds which enable them to choose a well-balanced meal
+at minimum cost. Lacking that sort of mind, I do not get on well in
+cafeterias. As sure as I equip myself with a tray and silver in a napkin
+and become one of the long procession, I lose all sense of proportion,
+and come out at the end with two desserts, or a preponderance of
+starches or with too much bread for my butter, and a surprising bill.
+
+Those who are cafeteria wise can choose a good meal for 28 cents or 33
+cents at the most. They don’t take food just because it looks delicious.
+They “yield not to temptation.” They have a plan and stick to it. Wise
+and strong-minded, they shuffle their way bravely to the end. It is said
+that in time they acquire a cafeteria shuffle which one can detect even
+on the street. But I don’t believe it’s so.
+
+Other sections of the country have cafeterias and in some parts of the
+South, especially in Louisville, they are run quite extensively. But
+it is in the West, especially in California, that they have attained a
+dignity and even lavishness that makes them the surprise and delight of
+the tourist. Irvin Cobb says that this is the cafeteria belt of which
+Los Angeles is the buckle.
+
+We have music in our cafeterias. We have flowers on the tables. People
+don’t just eat in them, they dine. They take their guests there. Our
+cafeterias have galleries with rocking chairs and stationery. They have
+distinctive architecture. We take visitors to see them. We brag
+about them, and when we wish to be especially smart we pronounce them
+caffa-tuh-ree-ah.
+
+Personally, I am proud of our cafeterias, but I do not get on in them.
+I enter hungry. I look sideways to see what other folks are eating. I
+decide to have corned beef and cabbage and peach short cake and nothing
+else. Then in the line I have the hurried feeling of people back of me,
+and that I ought to make quick decisions. Everyone ought to eat salad,
+so I take a salad. Then some roast beef looks good so I take that, and
+the girl asks briskly with a big spoon poised, if I’ll take potatoes,
+and I don’t wish potatoes, but she makes a great nest of them beside the
+meat and fills the nest with gravy and I pass on. According to Hoover
+or Maria Parloa or Roosevelt, I ought to have a vegetable, and so I take
+two. Meanwhile I have taken bread, but the woman ahead takes hot scones
+and so I do. I choose some thick-creamed cake, very fattening, but just
+this once, and then, oh, I don’t know. The tray is heavy and no place to
+put it, and in my journeying I peek at the bill and it’s over 75 cents,
+and when I finally sit down opposite a stranger I find on my tray two
+salads, and when I chose the other I don’t remember.
+
+But cafeterias are very fine for those who have cafeteria sense.
+
+
+
+
+The Open Board of Trade
+
+
+Months ago one of The Journal readers suggested a story to be found down
+on Market street near the Hobart building. Many times since when passing
+there I have thought that those street hawkers must have a certain
+picturesque and even humorous value, and hoping to find it I have
+stopped to listen. But the moment I stop they win me with their
+everlasting logic, and then blessed if I can write them up. They have
+the same effect upon others. I have seen chambers of commerce and stock
+exchangers and professors from Berkeley passing with a supercilious
+glance which did very well so long as they kept moving. But once let
+them step into the magic ring and they too became mesmerized and stood
+there gaping in spellbound interest. “Logic is logic, that’s all I say.”
+
+Those hawkers are artists, skilled in the arts and wiles of
+persuasiveness. There is one with a long, horse-hair wig which he
+occasionally brushes back from his eyes with a dignified flourish. This
+man has found the supreme elixir and the secret of perpetuity. He is the
+only man in the world, this modern Ponce de Leon, who knows the secret.
+Surely we need not blush to listen to its exposition, $2 is a small sum
+to pay for such a bonanza. Forty thousand people have used it in the
+last thirty-nine days. Think of it. “Take it right out into the crowd
+and sniff it for yourself,” he urges and somehow that breaks the spell,
+and strong men look foolishly at each other and move a-way.
+
+Horoscopes, suspenders, iron watch charms, brown cakes that may pass
+for maple sugar, ironing wax, laundry soap or penuchia, a book on
+Prohibition, mending wax and books of magic are all there. They are not
+things which we particularly want, but that’s the point. Anyone can sell
+things that people want. But these men are professional persuaders of
+men against their will whose mission it is to make people want what they
+don’t want. That’s Art.
+
+The horoscope seller must have taken his degree from some college of
+venders, his call has such finesse. I cannot reproduce the lilt of
+it--“Here’s where you get your horoscope, a dime, ten cents.” It is
+suggestive of the midways of country fairs, shooting galleries on the
+Board Walk, and circuses in the springtime. “Here’s where you get your
+horoscope, a dime, ten cents.”
+
+The little, old, blind man sitting there with one hand outstretched
+and the other holding a book, his white hair and beard neatly combed,
+reminds me of something Biblical and prophetic like pictures in old
+churches. Alas! no one seems to buy his story of prohibition. I think he
+would do lots better in Kansas or Iowa. A particularly fascinating
+one is the man of mending wax who stands before his table like some
+professor of chemistry with a tiny flame and saucers of mysterious
+powders and, I almost said, a blow pipe.
+
+But, pshaw, I can’t write them up. I take them too seriously. “Logic is
+logic, that’s all I say.”
+
+
+
+
+The San Francisco Police
+
+
+The San Francisco police are the handsomest and most-willing-to-flirt
+policemen in the United States, if not in the world. What a surly lot,
+the New York policemen. They treat one as though he were a blackguard
+for merely asking some direction.
+
+“What car shall I take for the New Jersey Central Ferry?” we ask.
+
+“Zippity-ip,” he snaps, moving off.
+
+“What did you say?” we ask in timid desperation.
+
+“Zippity-ip,” he yells, shaking his fist at us.
+
+But ask a San Francisco policeman the way and how different. He will
+take your arm and smile down at you and even go away with you chatting
+all the time--“Stranger here? Well, you’ll never go back East again.”
+ And somehow after that you never do.
+
+Of course, the San Francisco police are many things beside being
+handsome and willing to flirt. But these are important qualifications
+which, up to this time, have never had their place in journalism. Ah,
+many a Raleigh and Don Quixote in the roster of the S. F. police.
+
+A policeman is all things to all people. What a policeman is depends
+upon what we are. To those who are fast, either in reputation or
+driving, he is a limb of the law to be either evaded or cajoled. To
+the small boy he is a hero to aspire to become when grown. To the
+public-spirited citizen of the reforming order he is a piece of
+community linen to be periodically washed in public with a great hue in
+the papers about graft expose. To almost anybody in the dead of night
+with burglars prowling about, he is a friend to be called--in case one
+has a nickel handy.
+
+But to the great army of women who are hopelessly respectable, the
+policeman is something quite different. And what we women think of the
+police is important. We pay taxes, we vote and we cross the street. We
+like our policemen to be handsome and cavalier and, again I say, the S.
+F. police are both. Any fine day they will make a funeral procession out
+of the motor traffic to escort a nice woman across Market street.
+
+It goes without saying and is an unwritten law that policemen should be
+Irish. I enjoy Greeks in classic literature or in restaurants, but not
+as policemen. There is a saying in the city that when Greek meets Greek
+they go together to get a job on the Market Street Railways. But when
+they get upon the police force, I for one, shall move to the country.
+Policemen should always be Irish.
+
+And handsome. This is a woman’s reason, but listen: O men, are they not,
+I ask, a part of the civic beauty of the city? Is it not important that
+these animated equestrian statues should be gallant men upon noble and
+spirited horses? And who is more imperial in the pictorial life of the
+city than the officer on the Lotta Fountain pedestal by the raising of
+whose sceptered hand the life of the city moves or stays. Yes, policemen
+should be handsome and gallant. It is written.
+
+
+
+
+A Marine View
+
+
+Russian Hill had always seemed economically remote to me as an abiding
+place until recently I was invited out where some people were living in
+a modest apartment with a good view of the bay. And when they suggested
+that I try to get an apartment over there I decided to do it.
+
+It was a beautiful morning when I started out. There stood Russian Hill
+and as Gibraltar bristles with armaments so it glittered with windows
+facing the sea and one of them for me. Perhaps I could get a few rooms
+from a nice Italian family and fix them up. Ah, the Latin quarter,
+Greenwich village, the ghosts of artists haunting the place, Bohemians,
+enthusiasm, the lust for adventure. I bristled with personality.
+
+“Oh, you want a marine view,” said the real estate man. “Not for that
+price, lady.”
+
+A “marine view.” I didn’t want a marine view; I only wanted one window
+facing the sea. Surely with all those windows--.
+
+I left the real estate man and began wandering about. I asked a group of
+Italian women and they exclaimed in a chorus “No marine views left.” I
+hadn’t said a thing about a “marine view.” I wandered further and it was
+always the same. Some were smug and some were sorry but they all spoke
+of a “marine view” in a certain tone of voice, as Boston people say
+“Boston.”
+
+It was getting hot. I could not remove my coat because my waist was a
+lace front. Only a hair net restrained me from utter frumpiness. Still I
+was not altogether beaten and when I came to a nice countrified looking
+house standing alone in the midst of modern art and a man came out I
+asked him. The moment I did there came into his eyes a hunted glitter
+and he told me how he had held out against them and how he had been
+besieged for years to rent his marine view and wouldn’t.
+
+As I turned away I met an Irish delivery man and he said that there were
+dozens of vacant apartments very reasonable and waved his hand vaguely
+in the direction where I’d been searching. I like the Irish but his
+cheerful fibbery was the last straw and I went home.
+
+The next day my friends called up and said that they had a marine view
+for me. I was to live all summer in the apartment of the So-and-Sos
+while they were away. So now I am. They are artistic and I drink my
+coffee from saffron colored cups on a bay green table runner over a
+black table under a turquoise blue ceiling with a view of the bay from
+the window.
+
+But I am humble and if some day I meet a hot, tired looking woman who
+can’t find an apartment on Russian Hill, I shall say: “Shucks, a marine
+view isn’t so much.”
+
+
+
+
+Hilly-Cum-Go
+
+
+This is a story for children, because they will know it’s only fooling,
+while grown-up people will believe it’s true.
+
+The cable car isn’t a car at all, children, but is a hilly-cum-go, a
+species of rocking horse and a grown-up kiddie-kar. It is a native of
+and peculiar to San Francisco, and is a loyal member of the N. S. G. W.
+It has relatives in the South, and the electric dinkie that rolls up and
+down between Venice and Santa Monica is its first cousin. Some say that
+it is distantly related to the wheel chairs at Atlantic City. It is not
+at all common.
+
+The men who run it are its Uncles. The parents live underground caring
+for the young kiddie-kars. At times, if you peek down in that hole
+near the Fairmont and are careful not to be run over you may see them
+bustling about. Before she was married, the mama was a Marjory Daw of
+the Daw family, famous see-sawers. The children take after their mother.
+
+The Uncles are very kind and pick the hilly-cum-goes up in their arms
+as tenderly as a woman would. You must have seen them pick the little
+things up and run with them across the streets out of the way of autos.
+And at night they tuck them in their little beds and hear them say their
+prayer which goes:
+
+Oh, dear me, I hope I’m able, All day long to keep my cable.
+
+These hilly-cum-goes are not run by electricity at all, but just
+pretend. They are run by three things--black magic, white magic and
+a sense of humor. Black magic takes them up the hills, white magic
+restrains them down, and the sense of humor is in the Irish conductors.
+You may hear, if you listen, the magic coming out of the ground,
+“Kibble-kable, kibble-kable,” only fast as anything. At noon time
+it goes “Putter, putter, putter,” and at bed-time, “Kuddle-kiddie,
+kuddle-kiddie.”
+
+This magic is very, very important. Especially going down hill. Did you
+ever, my dears, descend that precipice at the end of the Fillmore street
+line? What is it that keeps you from landing flat on your nose on Union
+street? Nothing but white magic. What is it that keeps you from shooting
+from the Fairmont, straight down into the St. Francis? White magic.
+
+The sense of humor is also very important. Suppose a stout person gets
+on, the conductor hops immediately to the opposite side for ballast.
+That takes a sense of humor. If the hilly-cum-go is full of young
+people, especially sweethearts, the Uncle jiggles the hilly-cum-go
+horribly, but if old people are on it goes--“See-saw, Marjory Daw,” just
+gently.
+
+I trust, dear children, that all these facts will make you appreciate
+more the hilly-cum-go, and when you sit on it so cosy, so intimate with
+the street, riding along looking at the scenery, you will be thankful,
+that poor old horses do not have to tug you up hill, and that you
+have this sturdy little creature to haul you about. Nice little, old
+hilly-cum-go.
+
+
+
+
+I’ll Get It Changed, Lady
+
+
+This expressman was a regular San Franciscan. And there is such a thing,
+you know, as a regular San Franciscan. He is a native son and more. His
+speech betrays him. He calls a “car” a “cahh,” and when he’s surprised
+he says: “Yeah”! He has a permanent laugh in his eyes, and the only
+thing he gets mad about is prohibition. But the particular thing that I
+started to say of him is that money is to him a thing to spend. Money is
+an incident to life, that’s all.
+
+He said it would be a “dollar, six-bits,” and I was sorry, but I only
+had a ten-dollar bill. When I said that, he just reached out and took
+it from me, and said he’d get it changed, and disappeared. Now, the
+significant thing, and the one that made him a regular San Franciscan,
+was that he never dreamed that I would doubt his honesty in returning
+with the change. And I didn’t. It was this last that surprised me. If it
+had been in New York--I gasp--if it had been in New York, no expressman
+would have dared do such a thing because no one would have trusted him,
+and if they had been so hick as to trust him, the expressman would have
+had no respect for himself if he himself were so hick as to return with
+the change.
+
+I never shall forget the shock of seeing a pile of newspapers in front
+of a drug store, the day I landed in San Francisco, where men took their
+morning paper and threw down a nickel, and even made change for a dime.
+Right out on the pavement--a lot of nickels lying loose and no one
+paying any attention. Why, in New York--well, it couldn’t be done in New
+York, that’s all.
+
+It’s not because San Francisco is not metropolitan. For San Francisco
+is essentially a city just as Los Angeles will always be a terribly big
+country village. It’s not at all a matter of population. In Connecticut,
+we always said that Bridgeport was a city, and New Haven which was
+larger, was not. It’s a bing, and a zip, and a tra-la-la-lah, that makes
+one city a city and another not. I can explain it no other way.
+
+But with all its cityfiedness, there is a strange lack of suspicion, a
+free and easy attitude toward mere physical money, that one finds in
+no other large city except San Francisco. In the stores the clerks will
+say: “Shall I put it in a sack?” and you answer just as they hoped you
+would: “Oh, no, I’ll slip it right in my bag.” In New York as soon as
+one did that she’d be nabbed on the way out for a shoplifter.
+
+Perhaps the constant use of silver money has had something to do with
+the matter. Paper money can be tucked away. Silver is more spendable,
+everyone knows that. Break a five-dollar bill into “iron men,” and
+it’s gone, gone. And yet it can’t be the use of silver money alone that
+accounts for it. Reno has silver money, and yet there is little of the
+old, free Western spirit left in Reno.
+
+No, it’s something to do with San Francisco where suspicion doesn’t yet
+grip the hearts of men and where money is made to spend.
+
+San Francisco, the last stand of the old, free West.
+
+
+
+
+Fillmore Street
+
+
+I walk along on Fillmore street. I try to walk very fast with eyes
+straight ahead. One needs a strong will to take a-walking on Fillmore
+street and keep from spending all his money. In fact it is better to
+have no money at all for then one is tempted to hold on to it.
+
+Everything in the world is in the windows on Fillmore
+street--everything. There isn’t a phase of human activity that isn’t
+represented. Every nation has left its stamp. Spain--tamales and
+enchiladas. France--a pastry shop. Italy--spaghetti and raviolas.
+The Islands have for sale all that’s hula-hula. Here is a Hungarian
+restaurant. And the “O. K. Shoe Shop--While U Wait” is pure American.
+
+There is “Sam’s Tailor Shop.” I feel as though I should know this fellow
+Sam. Apparently he knows me from his chummy sign. Sam, Sam--I ought to
+remember Sam.
+
+Do you wish to paint and varnish? Well, here you are. Or to be shaved or
+have your eye-brows arched? Walk right in. Here is a place to learn to
+paint china. Here are drugs, corsets, religion, fish, statuary, cigars
+and choice meats all in a row. Meats, on Fillmore street, are always
+“choice” or “selected” or “stall-fed.” I doubt if you could get
+just “meat” if you tried. Next to the meats, out on a table before a
+second-hand book store is romantic, old “St. Elmo” of mid-Victorian
+fame. He must have come West by the “Pony Express.”
+
+I always stop, if I have time, to look at shoes to be mended. They are
+like people who have fallen asleep in public, off their guard and at
+their very worst. Take a shoe--a real, old shoe without a foot in it
+and it looks so foolish, betraying so mercilessly its owner’s bumps
+and peculiar toes. There is pathos there, too. A scrub woman’s run-down
+shoes, a kiddie’s scuffed-out toes, a man’s clumsy, clay-stained boots
+and the happy dancing slippers of a young girl.
+
+Back of the shoes--the cobbler. Cobblers are always philosophers. Not
+pretty men, but thinkers. In their little, dingy shops they sit all day
+with their eyes down, isolated from the “hum and scum” about them, to
+the tune of their “tap, tap, tap,” their minds are detached to think and
+philosophize and vision.
+
+Now we are at the corner where we turn away from Fillmore street. There
+is a window full of dolls. Such a lot of homely dolls. They don’t make
+pretty dolls any more. They make them to look like humans. “Character”
+ dolls they call them and they are “characters.” Now, when I was a little
+girl, they made dolls to look the way you wished human beings could
+look.--It is not hard to turn the corner.
+
+
+
+
+In the Lobby of the St. Francis
+
+
+There is something about having money enough to stay at the St. Francis,
+and to dine there and to wear smart clothes there that makes people
+step out and act sure of themselves. Even when they can’t afford it, and
+their stay there is a splurge or an outing, they act just as sure
+and stepping. And as for the people to whom the St. Francis is but an
+incident they act sure because they were born that way.
+
+Never in my life have I seen such sure, well-dressed women as in the
+lobby of the St. Francis. And I am no greenhorn at lobbies. I have
+reviewed in my day some of the best peacock alleys in the country. There
+is the New Willard. Now when I think of the New Willard, I see frumpily
+dressed dowagers talking through their lorgnettes to moth-eaten
+senators. The Selbach in Louisville, the St. Charles in New Orleans are
+famed for their handsome women, but none are so free and proudly sure of
+themselves on peacock alley as California women. No women dress as they
+do either. They are not so chic as they are smart; their tailor
+mades, their furs, their hats with a preponderance of orange, their
+well-dressed legs and feet and a reserved brilliance that makes them the
+finest-looking women in the United States.
+
+It is a fine pastime to step out from the surge of Life for a minute and
+let it ebb and flow around one in the lobby of the St. Francis. Such a
+pageant of individual stories. An exquisitely dressed young girl meets
+another there, and soon two young chaps appear and they all begin
+talking silly nothings, and laughing at each other’s silly jokes, and
+looking into each other’s foolish young eyes much as lovers have always
+done. A harassed business man rushes frantically to the telegraph desk
+and wires his firm at Pittsburgh. Some staid, comfortably-fixed tourists
+from Newton Center, Massachusetts, come in from sight-seeing and go up
+to their rooms and quickly get their shoes off. A group of Elks come
+in, arm-linked, and start one wondering about the enforcement of the dry
+law. In and out among all these moving comedies and tragedies flits like
+an orange-colored butterfly a little Oriental boy, an angel-faced page
+goes calling “Mister Smith,” and sober looking bell-hops stand alert to
+the sound of “Front.”
+
+A beautiful woman steps forward and meets a handsome man and they go to
+dinner together, and somehow I don’t think he is her husband and wonder
+if she is a widow and decide that it is none of my business. If she
+has a husband he is probably an “ornery” fellow who never takes her
+anywhere.
+
+Everyone who passes by me looks alert, and sure, and happy and
+prosperous, but I comfort myself that probably each one of them has as
+much to worry about as I myself do.
+
+
+
+
+The Garbage Man’s Little Girl
+
+
+This vignette is written because it can’t help itself and carries with
+it a hope that someone who reads it may know a little girl whose father
+is a garbage man. Suppose that you can’t think of anyone just now who is
+a daughter to a garbage man, it is best to read this just the same for
+you never know when you may meet her.
+
+When you do, tell her not to care too much when the children at
+school tease her about her father and cry--“Phew--phew, here comes the
+gar-bidge-Garrr-bidge-Garrr-bidge.” Tell her at that time to try and
+sustain her personal integrity with philosophy. It won’t do her a
+particle of good but tell her just the same.
+
+Tell her that her father is a terribly useful man. That if he should
+fail to function, then the disposal of garbage would become an
+individual problem and that the mamas of kids whose fathers are not
+garbage men would be obliged to say to their husbands--“Ed, dear, don’t
+forget to take the garbage bucket to the public incinerator on your way
+to the office.”
+
+Tell her that just because her father collects dirt, it is no disgrace.
+Tell her to look at the people in good standing who peddle dirt. Tell
+her to look at the papers. Tell her to tell the world that it’s better
+any day to collect than to peddle dirt.
+
+Tell her that when her father, up on his great smelly throne, drives
+around the corner of Powell and Geary that dressed-up folk needn’t
+disdain him so much. He’s a sermon. They won’t like him as a sermon so
+much as a garbage man but he’s a sermon just the same. The text is
+that back of most things that are dainty and beautiful is the drudgery
+worker. Tell her that there isn’t an immaculate kitchen in San Francisco
+that doesn’t depend upon her father.
+
+Nor a feast at the Palace or the St. Francis. Tomato skins and the nests
+that cauliflowers come in, and gnawed “T” bones. What would become of
+them if she had no father. And coffee grounds and the nameless things
+that have been forgotten and burned by the absent-minded. Tell the
+little girl about Omar Khayyam and how he might have said--.
+
+Oh, many a charred secret into the garbage can goes That from the
+kitchen range in blackened cloud once rose. Tell her that there is a
+professor at Yale whose father was a junk man. All this and more tell
+the garbage man’s little girl.
+
+
+
+
+The Palace
+
+
+Someone was telling me of an old couple who lost everything they owned
+at the time of the fire, and that they were very brave about it and
+never broke down, and even helped others, but that when someone came
+running up and said: “The Palace is on fire,” they both sat down on the
+curb and gave way completely to grief.
+
+And they say that after the fire the first piece of publicity which was
+given to the world as a proof that San Francisco would come back, was
+that the Palace would be rebuilt immediately. And a man from Virginia
+City, a descendant of the Comstock days, told me that in Nevada they
+speak of “The Palace” as Russians speak of the Kremlin as a pivot of
+destiny. What I am trying to say, of course, is that the Palace is a
+tradition just as the Waldorf-Astoria is a tradition, only not at all in
+the same way.
+
+The Palace is a great place for women who are alone and a place where
+a man may bring “the missus” with impunity. The Palace is stylish,
+perhaps, but principally it is select. It suggests to me women who wear
+suits of clothes, mostly dark gray, all wool and a yard wide, women who
+wear two petticoats and Hanan shoes and Knox hats and who carry suit
+cases covered with foreign express tags, and whom porters run to meet
+because they know that these women may not be so stylish as they are
+generous tippers. And the Palace suggests to me afternoon teas, and
+that peculiar composite chatter of women’s voices which is more like
+the sound of birds in a flock, and which Powys speaks of as a strange
+inarticulate chitter chatter which isn’t really speech at all.
+
+The other day a well groomed young official from the hotel took me out
+to see the famous old Palace bar and the beautiful Maxfield Parrish
+painting above it. They have taken the rail away, and around the edge
+of the bar they have built a nicely finished woodwork wall which looks
+exactly like a great coffin, the coffin of John Barleycorn. After the
+manner of my species I wanted to see over the edge and the young man,
+thinking that I might be suspecting a blind pig, boosted me up to peck
+over. I asked him why they didn’t remove the bar entirely and he said
+with unsmiling naivete that they were waiting “to see” and that they had
+saved the rail, “in case.”
+
+If I were a reformer I should agitate and have that remarkably joyous
+and beautiful Parrish painting placed where it could be seen. I’d take
+it out to some San Francisco school so that the dear Pied Piper and all
+the little round kiddies running after should be a delight to school
+children.
+
+And now I have come to the end and all that I have said is that the
+Palace Hotel is the San Francisco tradition and everyone in the United
+States knew that long ago.
+
+
+
+
+Zoe’s Garden
+
+
+Zoe says emphatically that it is not her garden, but everybody’s garden.
+But it is her garden because she tends it, and every morning goes around
+among her flowers lovingly, giving a little dig of dirt here, and tying
+some frail sisters up there and then, with her scissors, clipping,
+snipping and nipping away. Yes, it is Zoe’s garden.
+
+Anything that has spunk to grow is welcome in this essentially San
+Franciscan garden. And no one is allowed to bully the others. Big burly
+geraniums and proud dahlias must keep in their places and give the
+dainty lobelia, cinnamon pinks, oxalis and candy tuft their chance.
+The oxalis! How we tended it in pots in New England, and out here in
+California, bless its heart, it runs around like a native daughter. And
+as for the fuchsia, how far it has grown from the blue laws.
+
+There is no formality in Zoe’s garden. Marigolds go wandering about
+in the most trampish manner, and poppies, because they are privileged
+characters, spring up as they please. Then, as though the two of them
+were not sufficient California gold, there is the faithful gaillardia
+with its prim little sunflower-faces smiling up at their Mother Sun.
+
+It is a democratic garden, too. Golden rod and asters grow right in
+among the aristocrats. Fancy the snubbing they would get if they once
+ventured into a New England garden--Hm. There is freedom there, but
+not license, and every opportunity for individuality. The gladiolas,
+canterbury bells, gillie flowers and fox gloves grow as prim as in a
+conservative English garden. Pansies smile in their little bed, and
+although the nasturtium, the wild-growing, happy-go-lucky nasturtium,
+goes visiting around among all his neighbors, he is never allowed to
+interfere with those who wish to keep by themselves. The sweet peas stay
+very close to their tradition of wire netting, but they are not snobs at
+all, and give of their bounty to all who call. The sensuous jasmine is
+there, and the cold puritanical ceneraria and old maids’ pin cushions,
+with fragrance of sandalwood. The red-hot-poker grows stiff and
+straight, but the ragged sailor goes uncombed and untidy still.
+
+Cosmos is coming soon, dressed in her very feminine clothes, and the
+coreopsis has come on ahead. All old-timers are represented there,
+honeysuckle, wormwood, petunias, rosemary, gilias, mignonette,
+heliotrope and foxgloves. If they can not all be there together, all
+are there at some time in the summer. Montbretia, Japanese sunflower,
+larkspur, columbine and gourds all have their time and place and
+opportunity in this San Francisco garden. And the hollyhocks, the bossy
+things, I’ve a mind to leave them out. Besides I know some gossip about
+them. When Zoe was away to Yosemite one morning they were all leaning
+over from too much moonshine or too much sunshine and--well, I won’t
+repeat what the marigolds told me about them.
+
+Besides it is time to come away from Zoe’s garden, which is everybody’s
+garden.
+
+
+
+
+Children on the Sidewalk
+
+
+When you were a little girl, when you were a little boy, where did you
+play? Was it in a barn? Was it a city park? Did you hunt gophers on the
+plains of Iowa? Perhaps it was in a California poppy field. Perhaps
+a graveyard. I played in one, and remember very vividly the grave of
+Josephine Sarah Huthinson who died at the age of 11 months, and had
+a little lamb on the top of her stone and an inscription: “Except
+ye become as little children ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of
+Heaven.” Many delightful games we played around the grave of little
+Josephine.
+
+Wherever childhood found us we played, and out of our environment and
+often in spite of it, lived in a delightful world of our own into which
+no grownup ever really entered. Now, you and I, grownup, walk along the
+sidewalks of San Francisco and all we see under our calloused old
+feet is a sidewalk. But to children even a sidewalk blossoms with
+possibilities. Who but a child invented: “Step on a crack, you break
+your mother’s back.” Only the other day I saw a kiddie avoiding every
+crack and muttering some incantation as he walked along.
+
+And out of the sidewalk grew all the different types of kiddie kars and
+coasters that are so prevalent. I saw a whole load of children zipping
+down a steep San Francisco hill the other day much as we children
+coasted down winter hills on wicked “double rippers.” A hill and gravity
+and a lot of kids, what possibilities. And out of the sidewalk have
+evolved those nameless explosives that have been so popular over the
+recent Fourth. A row of kids sitting on a curb, one of them darts out
+to the car track, a car comes, great expectancy from the kids, terrific
+noise, annoyed looks on the faces of sour adults, unbounded joy from a
+row of kids sitting on the curb.
+
+Recently I saw a tomboy who had organized the children in her block, and
+had confiscated an alley between two straight gray houses, and I don’t
+know what the game was but it entailed trips on a car down the alley and
+a very bossy motorman, and “turns,” over which everyone quarreled.
+
+Some dainty little Chinese girls were playing a sidewalk game with a
+white stone which was a version of an old, old child game. The child
+would hop to the stone and kick it away and hop to it again until she
+missed, the object being to beat her opponent in the distance traveled.
+And I saw some exquisite little Japanese girls playing jump rope and
+chanting one of the numerous litanies that go with that beautiful game.
+
+The sidewalks of San Francisco. They are full of adventure. Robert Louis
+Stevenson would have seen it all. But to our dull eyes are only gray
+cement block. Just a sidewalk to us and to kiddies there are mountains
+in which Roy Gardner hides, and woods, and Tom Mix on a horse dashes
+right past us and we never see him at all.
+
+
+
+
+Feet That Pass on Market St.
+
+
+There is something about walking along Market street with the procession
+of people that passes all day, ah, how shall I express it? It is
+thrilling and it is amusing; it is cosmic and it is puny. It is often
+ridiculous and always sublime. Sometimes when we are in most of a hurry
+the consciousness of the procession will come to us. It is as though we
+were one of a moving crowd that never began and will never end. At such
+times we listen to the sound of their feet, the steady, unceasing
+step by step, an endless tramp as though it were beating out the
+rhythm--“Eternity, eternity, eternity.”
+
+As we pass voices call to us from the wayside, a cripple so far down
+below us on the very ground offering his silent pencils; the allurement
+of flowers; a hoarse newsboy with his old, old face screwed into a
+thousand anxious wrinkles; a blind man, silent supplicant, twirling
+his thumbs; and from the windows the call of strawberries at 15 cents
+a basket. Overhead an aeroplane hums its way and receives from us the
+tribute of an upward glance. We gaze upward and think how many years
+before our day aeroplanes were flying overhead in the dreams of men who
+passed and passed in the long procession.
+
+Idly we glimpse faces that pass us in the procession that meets ours. We
+pass them and are never the wiser for the struggle and tragedy that may
+be going on behind their show of brave masks. A man clutching his last
+dime and wondering whether to spend it for rolls and coffee or coffee
+and rolls. A business man absorbed and a lady pondering deeply some
+detail of her dress. A young girl with soft un-massaged chin hurrying
+to keep a tryst with her “friend,” and country folks, their feet sore on
+the unaccustomed pavements, glad to be going home soon.
+
+It is such an orderly procession and although they all seem to be
+walking along forever, there is an order in their going and each is on
+his way. Each one is free to go to his own place and yet no one is free.
+No one is free to leave the procession once he gets into it. Once a man
+is born he’s done for.
+
+Let him veer one iota from that procession and soon there will come
+rumbling up to the curb a big black Maria and off he’s whisked away
+from his fellows. Let him but get into the wrong house or take the wrong
+overcoat or chuck the wrong person under the chin--Pff! Let him forget
+where the long procession leads and wander about a free spirit and his
+wanderings will lead him to the madhouse.
+
+I love to be one of the procession that marches forever up and down
+Market street, such a brave procession.
+
+
+
+
+Where the Centuries Meet
+
+
+She was a tourist and she had just finished Sing Fat’s. As she passed
+out of the door she said smugly to her companion--“I don’t see anything
+so wonderful here.”
+
+I was standing right there and said I: “Madame, if you have been through
+Sing Fat’s and have failed, to see anything wonderful then you should
+go home and give yourself the Benet test which is used to test the
+intelligence of children.” Oh, of course, I didn’t say this so that the
+lady could hear. The bravest speeches we humans make are never aloud.
+Then I continued: “Madame, you may travel far in mileage but you will
+never take anything back to Dingville, Kansas, richer than a souvenir
+ash tray.”
+
+Why, just to take a trip from Sing Fat’s to the White House is a
+tremendous journey if one has the perceiving faculty. In Sing Fat’s
+a bit of old Cloissonne, tiny pieces of enamel on silver, done with
+infinite pains by hand labor, perhaps centuries ago, grown beautiful
+with age. In the White House georgette flowers, exquisite things made
+for the passing minute, a whiff and a whim and off they go. Just in
+these two there is a meeting of the centuries, Handcraft Days and the
+Machine Age--B. C. and A. D.--the oldest civilization in the world and
+the newest.
+
+The most interesting thing in Chinatown are the Chinese. To some they
+all look alike, but to me they seem very human and individual and
+folksy. I find myself paraphrasing: “But for the grace of God there
+goes John Bradford,” and when I meet a crafty looking old Chinaman this
+whimsy comes to me, “If Deacon Bushnell who passed the plate in the
+Centerville Methodist Church had been a Chinaman this is the way he
+would have looked.” They are such small town folks. Even with the steady
+cycle of tourists they gaze at each newcomer as though he were the
+latest comer to Podunk. One day with a friend I called on a Chinese
+girl, and all the large family and their friends gathered around and
+discussed us and laughed among themselves and pointed at us. It was
+embarrassing but I was never once conscious of rudeness, simply a
+childlike curiosity and honesty.
+
+In Chinatown the other day a peddler was selling spectacles and somehow
+the old men trying them on and squinting for “near” and for “far,”
+ seemed so quaint and countrified and like a lot of old Yankees around a
+country store trying to get a “new pair of eyes, by Heck.” In Chinatown
+the tong men do not seem at all real and the hair raising movie serial
+with its Chinatown terrors, Buddhist idols that open and swallow the
+movie actors and floors that drop into dungeons, seem very remote.
+
+
+
+
+Bags or Sacks
+
+
+“Do you like cafeterias?” I asked.
+
+“Don’t know,” he answered, “I’ve never played them.”
+
+“What religion do you follow?” another man asked me.
+
+In a mining camp they told me to take such and such a “trail.”
+
+The point is, that we did not talk that way where I came from. Of
+course, I hasten to say, we doubtless talked some other way just as
+peculiar. And if I could detect our colloquialisms I would write a
+lot about them but alas I can’t. I was in the West two years before I
+noticed that a “trolley” is a “street car.”
+
+A woman in a mining camp said to the stage driver, “I want out at the
+bank because I don’t want to pack this sack of silver.” In the first
+place we wouldn’t have had a sack of silver and if we had, it would have
+been in a “bag” not a “sack,” and we never “pack” things and we never
+“want out.”
+
+In the East we never refer to our locality as “this country,” as in
+the West and South. We do not take the name of our state either as
+“Californian” or “Kentuckian.” One never hears of a “Connecticutian” or
+a “Massachusettisian.” I do not profess to give any reasons for these
+peculiarities.
+
+In the West, speech is more brief. “Autos go slow” is the warning
+while on the Fenway in Boston the signs read--“Motor Vehicles, Proceed
+Slowly.” I wouldn’t swear to the comma but the words are identical.
+
+There is a small to near Provincetown where a sign reads--“Friends, we
+wish to think well of you and we wish you to think well of us. Kindly
+observe the ten mile motor limit.” After that the roads are so bad that
+one couldn’t possibly exceed ten miles if he tried. Probably the longest
+sign in California is that one which reads--“Drive your fool heads off.”
+
+“Booze-fighters” are Western. Oh, they’re Eastern too, but under
+a different name. It’s a misleading term, that. As though one were
+fighting against booze like an anti-salooner. I actually know of a woman
+who came West and thought for or a long time that a “booze-fighter” was
+a “Dry.” In the East he is a “rummy” and when he’s drunk he’s “tight.”
+
+“It’s a fright,” is Western. “Ornery,” is middle-Western. That’s
+a wonderful word. Sometimes, I wish I could live my life over with
+“ornery” in my vocabulary. It describes so many people I never knew just
+how to classify.
+
+There are no “T” bones in the East. And scrambled brains are not common.
+Oh, of course, we have them but not as something to eat. Personally, I
+was brought up to reverence brains and when I see them lying pale and
+messy on a plate in a Greek restaurant, I confess it gives me a start.
+
+Hot tamales have never crossed the plains East. And baked beans have
+never come West--not real ones. The difference between the Eastern
+baked bean and the Western is all the difference between a tin can and
+a religious rite and it is the same with succotash. A cruller is only
+a fried doughnut when it gets out West. Tea is more subtle in the East,
+but out here the waitress will ask “Black or green” in a black or white
+tone and stands over you until you decide. Maybe you don’t want black
+tea, maybe you don’t want green, but just “tea,” but there she stands in
+her unequivocation--“Black or green?”
+
+Silver money has never traveled East. A man told me recently that he
+didn’t like silver money when he first came out here and that it was
+always wearing his pockets out but since he’d gotten into Western ways
+it never wore a hole in his pockets any more. In the East a change purse
+is scorned by anything masculine, but here all the men carry one,
+I don’t know why not in the East, nor why in the West. Blessed old
+“two-bits” and a “dollar six-bits” are the only woolly things left over
+from the old wild West.
+
+What else--oh, I could keep on for pages. “Stay with it” is Western and
+has lots more feeling I think than “stick to it.” A Westerner when his
+wife and babies were going back East to visit her relatives, telegraphed
+to her brother--“Elizabeth and outfit arrive Tuesday.” And until she
+arrived the brother spent his time in conjecturing as to just what an
+“outfit” would mean. Rhubarb plant is “rhubarb” in the East and also
+“pie plant,” and one day I was in a fruit store and when the man--he was
+a Greek--yelled “Wha else?” I could only think of “pie plant” and so I
+didn’t get any.
+
+It’s all the way you are “brought up,” Eastern, and all the way you are
+“raised,” Western.
+
+
+
+
+Portsmouth Square
+
+
+“To be honest, to be kind.” Loiterers, vagabonds, slow-going Orientals,
+poets and blackguards, all day long come and drink at Stevenson’s
+fountain. Some of them look up and read it all and some only get as far
+as “to earn a little, to spend a little less”--.
+
+Small-footed Chinese women pass, humping along on their stumps and their
+babies running along beside have larger feet than the mothers who bore
+them, Bench warmers gaze after them with lazy curiosity. A fat Italian
+granddaddy washes a kiddie’s hand from the fountain and a man with a
+demijohn and a sense of humor goes smilingly down the path and what he
+has in the demijohn is none of our business.
+
+“To make on the whole, a family happier for his presence.” It is noon
+and a bride has brought lunch for herself and her husband off the job
+in his white overalls, and the two eat together on the beautiful grassy
+slope. The poplar trees around Stevenson’s fountain whisper poetry all
+day long and the little iron boat on top looks sad not to be sailing
+away on high adventure to the South Sea islands.
+
+“To renounce when it shall be necessary and not be embittered.” A woman
+with a baby carriage comes by. Something tender and sane and everyday
+and basic about her and her baby. A Chinese woman passing looks for all
+the world like a black and iridescent purple grackle in her shiny black
+coat and shiny black pants and shiny black shoes and shiny black hair,
+although the grackle has a prouder strut than her dancing little trot.
+
+“To keep a few friends and those without capitulation.” Where, oh where,
+do all the men come from who lie stretched out on the grass? I’ve seen
+the very same men lying on Boston Common, and when my father was a boy
+he said he saw them there. Hats over their eyes or else blinking up at
+the blue sky. Then on the curb facing the Hall of Justice, philosophers
+up from the water front or fresh from box cars, everyone with a story
+that Stevenson would have got from them.
+
+“Above all on the same grim conditions to keep friends with himself.” On
+the bench an enormous woman with a hat that looks like a schooner atop
+of a great pompadour wave and on the very same bench a mummied old
+Chinese as thin as a wafer. An aeroplane hums above and Stevenson’s
+little boat looks envious. Where did Captain Montgomery of the sloop
+Portsmouth stand when he planted the flag in 1848? The Mission bell, so
+many miles to Dolores, so many miles to Rafael. Ring, Mission bell, ring
+and show us where the El Camino Real will lead us all by and by. We who
+pass all day, show us the way, Mission bell.--“here is a task for all
+that a man has of fortitude and delicacy.”
+
+
+
+
+Miracles
+
+
+     “Why, who makes much of a miracle?
+     As for me, I know of nothing else but miracles.
+     Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
+     Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
+     Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water,
+     Or stand under trees in the woods,
+     Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,
+     Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car.”
+
+     --Walt Whitman.
+
+
+If man or woman be at all sensitive to life, he must react to the
+commonplace much as Whitman did. Such a person may be hurrying along
+about his business with perhaps no time for reflection and yet in
+a flash, the miracle of life will come to him through the slightest
+happening.
+
+A little girl on the ferry sitting with her mother takes from her small
+prim bag a set of doll clothes, and fondles them and smoothes them
+much like a pullet with her first chickens. The sight of those square,
+little, gingham dresses, trimmed with scraps of lace and silk and with
+awkward sleeves standing straight out, brought to me, on that Oakland
+ferry, all my childhood again, and I was cuddled close between the
+surface roots of a great elm and from the nearby lane came the sight and
+scent of Bouncing Bet, Joe Pye Weed, Tansy, Yarrow, Golden Rod, Boneset,
+and over in the meadow the sight of cows and the smell of peppermint and
+water cress, beside a little stream.
+
+The moment I write it down in physical words it becomes somehow less
+miraculous. The mind is so infinite and the human being so essentially
+mental, that the spoken or written word may never express them.
+
+The sight of electric lights flashing at night, the view of the city
+from a cable car, the wonder of great trucks bearing down upon us like
+fiery-eyed dragons, a bunch of poppies growing close to the roots of a
+billboard in the heart of the city, and the silhouette of a young girl,
+wind-blown, so that her straight slender figure shows more beautiful
+than the statue that tops Union Square. Up Kearny street the glimpse of
+eucalyptus trees on the top of Telegraph Hill standing out against the
+pink sunset sky, the postman with his pack of human messages on his
+back, the spirit of Robert Louis Stevenson in Portsmouth Square, and a
+row of old, old men sitting in the sun on Union Square discussing the
+Universe.
+
+Did you ever stand listening to the seals just at nightfall, and did
+their weird, low call stir you to a feeling of kinship with all the
+creatures of the great deep, and did you lose yourself there out under
+the cold, dark water in that mysterious untamed world of the sea that is
+older than the land?
+
+I don’t know what it’s all about. I only know we need more poets. Still
+every man who reacts to life and feels it to be a miracle, he is himself
+a poet. Even Whitman could only articulate in terms of wonder.
+
+
+
+
+Impulses and Prohibitions
+
+
+One day last week a man--a regular man, neither a decided proletarian
+nor a typical bourgeois--but just a man was walking along. He was
+dressed in average clothes, he was shaved and carried a suit case and
+didn’t look out of work and was evidently going somewhere.
+
+He was walking along with this suit case--it was on Larkin near
+McAllister about two o’clock on one of those superb days of last
+week--and he came to a place where there was a stretch of grass near the
+sidewalk. I think he was hot and the suit case was getting heavy....
+
+At any rate when he saw that grass, tall, dark green and fragrant, he
+immediately lay down on it, pulled his hat over his eyes and, I expect,
+went to sleep. It sounds so free and easy written down. Which makes it
+no less significant.
+
+First, it was significantly Western. An Easterner or a Middle Westerner
+would have thought it over first. Then the fact that the man was so
+average made it significant. If he had looked like a vagabond it would
+have been not even an incident. It is we who are respectable who
+are fettered by Grundy. It was a logical thing to do and natural and
+terribly human, but most of us can’t do the logical thing and natural
+even if inside we do feel terribly human. Especially these spring days.
+Today at noon I would like to have gone up on the grass in Union Square
+and taken my shoes off. Why didn’t I? Not because of the police--but
+Grundy.
+
+Now a Piute Indian woman could have done it. Her stockings too. A Piute
+Indian woman when she’s tired she sits down right in the street, right
+where she’s tired. But you and I, when we are weary we may sigh--“Wish I
+could sit down.” But we can’t, not until we’ve gone down the street and
+up in the elevator to some particular place where Grundy says we may
+sit.
+
+The most significant thing about that man on the grass was that he
+was in the heart of a great city. Cities are like homes. Some you’re
+comfortable in--some you’re not. Now, San Francisco, it is a real city,
+with all the metropolitan lares and penates, dignified and vividly
+active. And yet there is no city in the country whose children may be as
+“at home” as here. It is the only city I know of that has forgotten to
+provide itself with nasty little “Keep Off The Grass” signs. It will
+probably never be an altogether prohibition town.
+
+
+
+
+Stopping at the Fairmont
+
+
+It is best to say at the very beginning that if one is tremendously
+wealthy he will not enjoy this dissertation on staying at high class
+hotels. If one has more than two bathrooms in his home and can afford
+chicken when it is not Sunday and turkey when it is not Christmas and
+could stay at the Fairmont all winter if he preferred, then these words
+will mean nothing to him.
+
+She has gone, this friend of mine. All winter she has been staying at
+the Fairmont. Much of the time I, too, have been staying at the Fairmont
+as her guest. So it is with a sense of double bereavement that I write.
+
+Talk to me no more of the comfort of cozy little homes. Give me a hotel
+where I am treated as though I were a Somebody. Where I have but to
+press a button and a liveried servant comes running as though I were
+Mary, Queen of England, or Clara Kimball Young. And plenty of hot water
+for baths and lots of enormous towels and, as soon as one’s butter is
+gone, another piece, and fresh butter at that. Pitchers of ice water and
+a strapping big man standing so solicitously and watching one’s every
+mouthful. It makes me feel as though I were the Shah of Persia. At home
+I don’t feel at all like the Shah of Persia.
+
+I came across something the other day that Boswell quotes Dr. Johnson as
+saying on this same subject: “There is no private house in which people
+may enjoy themselves as at a capital tavern. At a tavern you are sure
+you are welcome, and the more noise you make, the more trouble you give,
+the more good things you call for, the welcomer you are.”
+
+This friend of mine can go to the room telephone and say, so
+incidentally, “Room service, please,” and order a meal in her room with
+almost negligence. That, I say, is elegance. Taxis, too, are another
+test. I never order a taxi without a feeling of sea-sickness. Even when
+someone else is paying the bill I can’t sit back in comfort. Always they
+are ticking off the minutes as though they were my last on this earth.
+
+They are simple tests that divide the plebeian from the patrician. Was
+it Kipling who wrote:
+
+“If you can order breakfast in your room and not feel reckless, If you
+can ride in taxis with aplomb, If you can read the menu and not the
+prices, Then, you’re a qualified patrician, son.”
+
+After my friend had gone I went back to the hotel and someone else was
+in her room and no one treated me as though I were the Queen of Sheba
+and I went out into a cold, indifferent world where no one cares when
+my glass is empty, where no chair is pushed under me at table and where,
+alas, I must sugar my own tea or go without.
+
+
+
+
+San Francisco Sings
+
+
+Some Cities roar and others hum, but San Francisco sings. Especially on
+Saturday at noon and downtown. Saturday noon in San Francisco is like
+nothing else anywhere but Saturday noon in San Francisco. And Saturday
+noon is like the noon of no other day but Saturday. On Sunday they’re
+off. On Saturday noon everybody’s on the street.
+
+There are more flowers on Saturday noon. On the street stands great
+plumes of gold acacia, riots of daffodils, banks of violets, white, waxy
+camellias and branches of Japanese peach blossoms. It’s still winter by
+the calendar but it’s spring in San Francisco. Everywhere you turn a man
+or boy from the country with baskets of the spring flowers. All you
+want to carry for two bits and a nice bunch for a dime. Big, fat men and
+oldish men with young twinkles in their eyes sell them, unromantic, but
+very nice to deal with.
+
+There are the flowers and there are the women. No women in the country
+so beautiful. No women in the world wear color as they do. Their colors
+are never primitive, never gaudy, but gorgeous and vivid and alive,
+seldom do you see a woman dressed in black, and black hats almost never.
+Sit in the gallery of any church on Sunday morning when the sun comes
+pouring in and it is as though you were looking down on flowers.
+
+Never two alike in the Saturday noon crowd and yet the same type. Free
+women, happy women, regular women. Women who can recall a judge or so
+and still be graceful and dainty. It is very significant that a San
+Francisco woman stands at the very pinnacle of the city, graceful and
+alert on that tall slender column in Union Square.
+
+And the Saturday noon men--men?--men? In describing color what can
+one say of men? Well, it’s not their fault that they can’t wear pretty
+clothes. They make a nice grey background for the women and a very
+desirable audience and that’s the best I can do for them.
+
+The street musicians, they contribute a lot to the Saturday noon
+atmosphere. And when we drop a penny into their cups, perhaps it is not
+so much pity as pay for the joy their piping gives us. And the people
+who call papers, of whom the blind are the dearest of all. There’s a
+blind man on Powell street who sounds exactly as though he were saying
+Mass.
+
+Dearie me, I can’t describe it. All its lilt and rhythm and color and
+humanness as well. And ladies walking along with huge white balloons
+from the White House as though they had been blowing bubbles from some
+great clay pipes. And a plump, rosy Chinese woman so dainty in her
+breeches with her shiny, black hair bound in a head dress of jade and
+opal and turquoise.
+
+We need more poets.
+
+
+
+
+Van Ness Avenue
+
+
+Van Ness avenue is sole. Nowhere in the wide world does the proud and
+culminating automobile own and dominate such a wide and sweeping display
+boulevard.
+
+The automobile, what a magnificent animal it is, long, low, luxurious,
+purring softly, full of a great reserve, ready to dart forward, not to
+the cruel touch of a spur or bit, but to the magic touch of a button.
+It is the culminating achievement of this period of the machine age. The
+airplane, clumsy and awkward as yet, belongs for its consummation to the
+men of tomorrow. The automobile is the zenith of today’s accomplishment,
+and that is why men speak of it as “super” this and “super” that.
+
+The machine age has its own cruelties and its own, ugliness, but it
+also has its own art and its own beauty, of which the automobile and the
+houses which men have built to accommodate it, are the consummate art.
+Not all will agree with me here. The critics will damn me with disdain,
+and the King of Van Ness, who ought to agree, but is too busy talking
+cars, will only remark, if he listens at all: “Pretty good dope at
+that.” But argumentatively I proceed.
+
+Not that I can name them. I am only sure, really sure, of a Ford. But
+I admire them with a great pride in my human kind. They sit so
+majestically in their palaces on Van Ness, great limousines, powerful
+roadsters, luxurious touring cars, waiting there on display and
+containing in themselves all the skill, energy, artifice, and beauty of
+line, color and trim that the machine age can produce.
+
+And the buildings on Van Ness strike a new and independent note in
+architecture. All that the ages have contributed of arches, columns,
+coloring and lighting are utilized and made into palaces of great
+dignity and beauty. There is something about the arched and windowed
+walls and the spacious, open look of the buildings that is entirely
+distinctive and Van Ness. It is not Mission, Grecian or Colonial, but
+it is all of them. It is as new and distinctive as the service stations
+that have sprung out of the automobile needs. If we dared we would call
+it entirely American.
+
+And the printing that high lights each building is an achievement in
+modern art. Who but Americans would dream of using printing instead of
+gargoyles or classic medallions as ornamentation. Some of it is very
+beautiful and almost none is ugly. The use of the word “Paige,” the
+printing of “Buick,” the “H” of Hupmobile, the Mercury “A” of Arnold are
+to me very beautiful.
+
+Van Ness avenue. It is exactly like its name. A long wide sweep for the
+regal motor car, the most wonderful and proudest automobile row in
+the world. The ghosts of the old, aristocratic and residential
+before-the-fire Van Ness have seen to it that even commercialized it
+shall still be--Van Ness.
+
+
+
+
+The Blind Men and the Elephant
+
+
+You live in San Francisco and I live in San Francisco, and so does the
+man who owns the peanut wagon on the corner, and none of us live in
+the same San Francisco--funny. We’re like the blind men who each gave a
+different version of the elephant.
+
+To some, San Francisco is always eight o’clock in the morning or six
+o’clock at night, swinging on the straps homeward, swallow their dinners
+and to a show in the evening. Such people never have wandered through
+Golden Gate Park of an afternoon or sunned themselves on the benches of
+Union Square. They have never seen San Francisco by week-day sunlight.
+
+Then there are home women and leisure women to whom San Francisco is
+always afternoon, down-town in the shopping district with ladies in
+pretty clothes passing each other on the street or in and out of the
+sweet-scented stores.
+
+To some, San Francisco is always night. A taxi-driver who used to be a
+newsboy down on the old Barbary Coast. He has never seen anything but
+the night life of the city. Not bad, but night provincial--a sort of
+male version of Trilby.
+
+The neighborhood of Merchants Exchange on California Street is San
+Francisco to hundreds of men. They ride out to the golf links and into
+the country on Sunday. Occasionally they go to New York, but when they
+return San Francisco is limited to the neighborhood where men inquire
+anxiously--“Is she picking up any in the East?”
+
+No matter how wealthy, no matter how poor, to each of us San Francisco
+is very much limited in the confines of what each of us is interested
+in. It’s funny when you stop to think about it. How the Master of
+Marionettes must laugh at us when he sees us together. Perhaps some
+night after the show, the traffic cop raises his imperial hand and
+there, waiting to pass, the taxi driver of the night and a dear little
+home woman with her husband, and Mr. Chamber-of-Commerce and close to
+him a man who has never seen San Francisco by week day sunlight. There
+they all wait looking out of their eyes on San Francisco and each seeing
+it so differently.
+
+San Francisco is one thing to you and another thing to me and something
+entirely different to the man on the peanut stand.
+
+
+
+
+You’re Getting Queer
+
+
+Everyone ought to have--well, what is it that everyone ought to have?
+No, not a machine, not necessarily a garden and not even a camera.
+Everyone ought to have children. If not children of their own, then
+borrowed ones or nieces or nephews or the neighbor’s kids. Everyone
+ought to have children.
+
+People who have no children anywhere in their environment to whom they
+can talk intimately soon become queer and lop-sided. They may not always
+realize it but others will find them awkward and stilted and covered
+with cobwebs and dust. Such people will be found hard to get on with
+and full of snippiness. It is half what ails folks, that so many of them
+have no children in their lives and it affects them like malnutrition.
+Let a baby enter a street car filled with moldy, musty grown-ups and
+watch the starved looks and the foolish and pathetic boohs and pokes
+they will dart in the direction of the child.
+
+It is often my privilege to tell stories to a group of babies, and one
+day when they were crowded close around me one of them exclaimed--“Hey,
+you spit right in my eye.” Then it came to me what a lot of eyes I had
+probably spit into all down the years, and how no one had ever told me
+of it so frankly before. Children are so honest until we teach them to
+say that they’re sorry when they’re not, and to listen to stories that
+bore them and to pretend not to like Jazz when all the time they do.
+
+Contact with children takes us back to the genesis of our being and
+revives in us something primitive and honest and natural. I saw a man
+recently being led out of a grown-up meeting by the hand of a child and
+he looked so cross about it and was so obviously trying to maintain his
+dignity while the child hurried him up the aisle. I thought how silly.
+When a child has to leave a meeting he has to, that’s all, and there’s
+no use in arguing or getting cross about it. And really how good it
+was for that pompous individual to get taken down a peg by the terribly
+human appeal of a little child.
+
+All of us ought to find some children to tell stories to for our own
+sakes. And then when we have gotten Jack up the beanstalk and into the
+ogre’s kitchen, and the ogre says in an awful voice--“I smell a human
+being,” perhaps there will come to us some of the old thrill that we had
+forgotten.
+
+If you don’t know any children intimately, children who call you
+“George” or “Auntie Flo,” children who run to meet you, children who
+hurt your pockets with anticipation, children to whom you read the
+funnies or whom you take to the movies, children for whom you may revive
+your childhood tricks of making a blade of grass squawk, or wiggling
+your scalp, or cutting out a row of dancing paper dolls, then hurry and
+get acquainted even if you are driven to pick them up. If you don’t,
+then as sure as you’re alive, you’ll find yourself growing queer.
+
+
+
+
+The Ferry and Real Boats
+
+
+As a matter of fact the ferry isn’t a boat at all. It is more like a
+house or a street car or a park full of pretty benches. It doesn’t sail,
+it only plies, plies between two given points at stated intervals, and
+could anything be more dull. Nothing is more prosaic than a ferry unless
+it be an ironing board.
+
+Even a barge is superior, and a barge doesn’t pretend to be a boat. A
+barge goes somewhere and it gets mussed up by the real salt sea, and so
+do flat, old scows, honest and rough and sea-going. Any boat in the bay
+is superior to the effeminate ferry. Even the boat to Sacramento has a
+bit more atmosphere. As for tug boats, they are little, but O-my as they
+pull the great, impotent barges after them. Pilot boats have quite an
+air making the big, dignified steamers look foolish being yanked here
+and there. The tidy fisherman’s motor boats look rather unimaginative,
+all tied in rows at Fisherman’s Wharf, but they go somewhere, sometimes
+away down the coast and from their sides the long nets reach away down
+into the sea itself.
+
+How the real boats in the bay must despise the ferry. Think of being
+called a boat and never once sailing out of the Golden Gate. How
+maddening it must be. If the ferry had any spirit at all, some day it
+would just switch about and go chunking out to sea. Imagine then the
+concern of the staid commuters from Oakland and Alameda to say nothing
+of the citizens of Berkeley and Marin County, to find themselves being
+borne away from their vegetable gardens and fresh eggs out to sea in a
+wooden boat.
+
+I suppose there are many people living right here in San Francisco who
+have never sailed away out of the Golden Gate, people who have been
+bound economically or by love or duty, and have had to ply like the
+ferry daily between two given points. But can there be a man who has
+seen tall-masted schooners and long-bodied ocean-going steamers pass in
+and out of the alluring Golden Gate, and has never longed to sail away
+to the enchanted South Seas, or to Alaska. Such a man is not a man any
+more than the ferry is a boat.
+
+If I could choose the boat I’d sail away upon, it would not be a
+coast-wise steamer, nor the prim Alaska packers nor even the steamers to
+the Orient. I’d choose me a four-masted schooner, carrying freight and
+going somewhere, anywhere, no one knows where. And then some day the
+wind would die or some night the wind would howl and there would come to
+me a great longing for or a ferry that should take me home at night in a
+safe and prosaic manner.
+
+
+
+
+A Whiff of Acacia
+
+
+In Connecticut now, and in Illinois and in Utah too, it is lilac time.
+Lilac time--I’ll stop, if you please, to say the words over lovingly. In
+San Francisco now the lilacs are in bloom but it is not lilac time. In
+Golden Gate Park the rhododendrons are blossomed into gorgeous mounds of
+color but they are not an event in San Francisco, only an incident. In
+“The Trail of the Lonesome Pine” set in the mountains of Virginia, they
+are the dominant background.
+
+Poppies and lupine and many others are the flower tradition of
+California but they are not what I mean here. It is an impression
+of mine that San Francisco more than any other city has taken the
+traditional plants and flowers of other sections and made them into a
+composite that makes up the plant atmosphere of this city.
+
+Take roses and geraniums and callas, none of which are epochal because
+they are always at hand. But with old Mrs. Deacon Rogers in Connecticut
+who nursed her calla through the long winter that she might take it to
+church on Easter Sunday, the calla was history.
+
+Even the camellia San Franciscans take very philosophically. It has
+not, for instance, the supremacy that Dumas gives it in “Camille.” In
+Sacramento they feature it more and an Easterner who saw them picking
+it in branches instead of single flowers, exclaimed: “Why, they think
+they’re oleanders.”
+
+The plant and flower atmosphere of a community is very important. Some
+child is now growing up in the city, who some day will be far away when
+there will come to him a whiff, perhaps of acacia, and in an instant
+there will come surging over him all the feel and urge and thrill and
+wistfulness and dreams of his childhood, and he will be once more in the
+atmosphere of San Francisco. It will not include winter and summer but
+an all-round-the-year-ness, it will not mean a flower, but flowers,
+cherry blossoms from Japan, acacia from Australia, and the best from
+everywhere which all together will mean to him--San Francisco.
+
+The smell of the acacia, which he knew as the wattle, inspired Kipling
+to write those words
+
+     “Smells are surer than sounds or sights
+     To make your heart strings crack.”
+
+Perhaps many others see with me this difference between San Francisco
+and the rest of the country, as though nature here expresses herself in
+bounty more than in resurrection. Oh, well, whether it be “lilac time”
+ or “all the time” to each locality there is its own beauty and, as for
+me, I have yet to find, in all my travels, the “place that God forgot.”
+
+
+
+
+It Takes All Sorts
+
+
+“Hey, hey,” called the tall, nervous man with the fat, little wife,
+waving his arms at the conductor for fear he would be carried past his
+corner.
+
+“It takes all sorts of people to make a world,” remarked the
+sensible-looking woman beside me.
+
+It is not the first time that I have been impressed with the philosophy
+of those words. Who said them first, I wonder. “It takes all sorts of
+people to make a world.” That is, if we only had one sort or even a
+number of sorts we would have no world. To make a world there must be
+all sorts, including the funniest folks we ever knew.
+
+I looked from the sensible woman with her well-chosen clothes to
+the woman across the way. This second woman was a sort of
+dressed-up-and-no-place-to-go type, with a squirt of Cashmere Bouquet in
+the center of her handkerchief. And nothing on that went with anything
+else she had on. And a hat which one knew was a hat, because it was on
+her head, otherwise it might have passed for almost anything.
+
+The woman beside me wouldn’t have been caught dead looking like the
+second woman. Yet she should have been thankful for her. For it is only
+by contrast that the well-groomed look smart, and the overdressed look
+fussy. Whether that is Einstein’s theory of relativity or not, I don’t
+know. I only know that, “It takes all sorts of people to make a world.”
+
+There we sit on parade in these side-seater cars, and what we are is
+revealed so pitilessly to all who sit across from us. It is as though
+Fate were making jokes of us and sits us down beside the antitheses of
+ourselves. Such a one of Nature’s jokes I saw recently. They were
+two men. The first was the sort whom one calls an “old boy.” A racy
+individual, well-fed with a round front, an Elk, of course, a city man,
+reeking of good cigars, and an appraising eye out for a good-looking
+woman.
+
+Beside him sat a man who had been studying birds in the Park. Berkeley
+was written all over him. A thin, pure type. He was dressed in field
+glasses and a bag full of green weeds and stout walking boots. There
+was an ecstatic glint in his eye which meant that he had discovered a
+long-billed, yellow-tailed Peruvian fly-catcher, “very rare in these
+parts.”
+
+So there they sat packed in so close and so terribly far apart, both so
+necessary to the making of a world.
+
+And as they sat a boy entered the car with a shoe-box, full of holes,
+and out of the holes came a “peep” and then another. And the Berkeley
+man lost his abstracted look and the man-about-town laid down his paper
+and pretty soon the boy lifted the lid a bit and both men peeked in.
+
+
+
+
+The Fog in San Francisco
+
+
+Sunsets in the desert, spring in New England, black-green oaks lying on
+tawny hills in Marin County, fields of cotton on red soil in Georgia,
+surf on the rocks of Maine, moonlight on Mobile Bay, and the way the fog
+comes upon San Francisco on summer afternoons.
+
+Sometimes when all its hills lie sparkling in the sunshine and children
+play on the sidewalks, young fellows whistle, business autos go
+zippity-ip around the corners, and the whole city is out of doors or
+hanging out of the windows, then suddenly in great billows the fog comes
+rolling in through the Golden Gate, and between the hills right up the
+streets into the city.
+
+Then immediately all is changed and everything is nearer and more
+intimate and nothing of the city is left but the street you’re on. Then
+you hurry home for supper and home seems good and sometimes you even
+light a little fire in the grate.
+
+Still it is not a cold fog, it is not a wet fog, it is never an unkind
+fog. It comes swiftly, but very gently, and lays its cool, dainty hand
+on your face lovingly. Hands are so different, sticky or wet or clammy
+or hot, but the hand of the San Francisco fog is the hand of a kind
+nurse on a tired head. The rain is a beautiful thing too, but the fog
+has another significance.--It is the “small rain” that Moses spoke
+of--“My doctrine shall drop as the rain, my speech shall distil as the
+dew, as the small rain upon the tender herb, and as the showers upon the
+grass.”
+
+It is very beautiful too. My, but I’ve seen fogs that were ugly, and
+heard the fisherman say “She’s pretty thick tonight.” San Francisco fog
+is not like that, but like great billows of a bride’s veil. Then in the
+morning when the sun comes it chases the bride and her veil out so fast,
+and they go out to sea together, sunshine and fog.
+
+The other morning I awakened very early and there in the square of my
+window was a hard, black cube against a white background. I lay there
+and blinked and wondered where that telephone pole had come from, which
+like Jack’s beanstalk, had grown there overnight. Then I saw that the
+fog had shut out the whole world and brought that pole close, and made
+it seem big and formidable and ugly.
+
+The fog makes some people lose their perspective, and for others it only
+wraps with a great kindness the whole world and blots out all ugliness.
+But upon everyone, upon the just and unjust, this San Francisco fog lays
+its gentle hand lovingly and with an ineffable kindness.
+
+
+
+
+A Block on Ashbury Heights
+
+
+Sometimes in the afternoons when the mothers are out shopping and the
+youngsters have not yet returned from school our block looks so deserted
+and wind-swept and dull. The houses are so much alike. They all sit
+there in a row with their poker faces like close-mouthed Yankees
+refusing to divulge any secrets. But from the bow-windows where I
+sit and type, in spite of their silence the house fronts have become
+individualized into so many human stories.
+
+I never stop to look out but somehow the stories get in through the
+window. For instance, I would not be so rude as to stare at the family
+washing which once a week is hung on the flat top of a neighbor’s
+garage, but those clothes up there have a way of flapping in the wind so
+conspicuously that I cannot help see. There is the man of the house and
+his, shall I say garments, kick themselves about like some staid old
+deacon having his fling. Then there is the middle-sized bear whose
+bloomers, billowed by the wind, become a ridiculous fat woman cut off at
+the waist. And the little bear’s starched clothes crack and snap while
+the revolving tree-horse whirls about like some mad dervish. I often
+wonder if the family know of the wild actions that take place on the
+roof.
+
+It is a very respectable block inhabited mostly by grown-ups except
+one lively house where a dog lives with some boys and their incidental
+parents. The door of that house continuously bangs, and other boys with
+other dogs are always hanging around whistling under the windows.
+
+Most of the windows are only used to admit light except one that is
+used to look out of and is inhabited by an old lady who sits all day and
+knits for her grandchildren. It must not be so bad, I think, to look
+out of the window upon life instead of always rushing off to catch a car
+that takes one into the thick of it.
+
+Out of the window of my kitchenette I can look into the window of a girl
+in the next house. Every morning I get my breakfast by her dressing. My
+coffee I start as she begins to unwind her curls from their steel cages.
+I have a suspicion that she also dresses by me. If she sniffs my coffee
+first, I imagine she hurries with her curls. She is usually fixing her
+eye-brows to my toast and by the time I sit down she is doing her lips.
+
+After that she goes off for the long day and so do most of the people in
+the block. Then at night they all return, drawn by some tie of love or
+habit or despair, each to his right place in the long row of houses,
+which have been sitting there all day with their poker faces, waiting.
+
+
+
+
+The Greek Grocer
+
+
+He had just opened a store on our street and in a Lady Bountiful spirit
+of helping him out, I went in to do a little trading. I told him I
+would like a can of baked beans. Baked beans, but he didn’t seem to
+understand. So pointing over the counter where they were in plain sight,
+I said with all my teeth and tongue: “Baaked Beens.” He followed my
+finger. “Oh,” he said correcting me, “You min Purrk ind Bins.”
+
+That was the beginning and for weeks that Greek has been correcting
+my pronunciation. There is no use to argue about it. The fellow has no
+reverence for Noah Webster and besides there are more Greeks, nowadays,
+than Yankees, and their way is probably getting to be the right way.
+Sometimes I think it is we who are the “foreigners.”
+
+Once it was cauliflower. Now, I say cauliflower exactly as it is spelled
+but that isn’t right. It is “Culliefleur,” said staccato. And honey--one
+day I wanted honey and after I had sung “Hunnie, hunnie” in high C, and
+he didn’t understand, I went around and picked out a jar of it. “Oh,” he
+said reproachfully, “you min hawney.”
+
+A Scotch woman had a scene with him the other day over some “paeper.”
+ There is no way of spelling it as she said it. She kept repeating it
+and he kept getting the wrong thing. No, she didn’t want paper but
+“paeper”--seasoning for the table--salt and “paeper.” The more excited
+she got, the more Scotch she got and the more confused he. Then, when
+they were both fairly hysterical, I discovered that it was pepper.
+
+Then you should have heard that Greek scold. He told her that it was
+“Pip-RR.”
+
+And she said back, “Paeper.”
+
+Then they argued and never once did either one of them get it “Pepper.”
+
+“Paeper.”
+
+“Pip-RR.”
+
+“Paeper.”
+
+“Pip-RR.”
+
+One day I heard him laying down the law to a woman who had dared
+question his price of “Rust Bif.” He told her what he had to pay for
+it in “Cash Mawney” and asked her if she could do so, to explain.
+“Explin--you kin explin--explin.” But she couldn’t explain. So,
+chastened, she meekly bought the roast beef at his price.
+
+Yesterday a U. C. girl was in and asked, “You are a Greek, are you not?”
+
+“Naw,” he answered, “you min Grrik.”
+
+
+
+
+Billboards or Art
+
+
+If you like billboards you are not artistic. Take it or leave it. That’s
+the criterion. It’s not my verdict. Ask those who know, the literary
+clubs, the art clubs and our distinguished guests from Europe. I can
+remember away back when Pierre Loti visited this country and was so
+shocked at the glaring billboards that marred the beauty of New York
+harbor and blinded his continental eyes with their gaudy colors.
+
+Now, I would like to be both artistic and fond of billboards. I can’t be
+both. So I choose--billboards. Everyone who reads these words must make
+his choice.
+
+I not only enjoy them; I think they are beautiful. A lovely splash of
+color in the grayness of the city, a sincere expression of American
+life, so sincere that the critics who take their opinions from Europe
+never have been able to sneer us out of them.
+
+We must admit, those of us who admire billboards, that the critics had
+their justification in the early days. We have not forgotten the days
+when mortgaged farmers prostituted their barns by selling advertising
+rights to Hood’s Sarsaparilla and Carter’s Little Liver Pills and to
+Lydia Pinkham, and when Bull Durham marred every green meadow from
+Boston to Washington. Billboards were an unsavory addition to the
+landscape then. But the modern art of bill posting is quite a different
+thing and in California it has reached its highest development.
+Segregated spots of color in the dun cities, surrounded by well
+manicured lawns, supported by classic figures in white and lighted by
+dainty top lights. And out along the boulevards, how lovely they are at
+night, luminous breaks along the dark highways, suggesting so tactfully
+the kind of tire to use or the sort of mattress to lie upon.
+
+The critic has had his mission. He has forced the Poster man.
+Fortunately though young America has not taken him seriously. If he
+had this country would have missed some of its most distinctive
+contributions to Art. The electric sign for instance. That was condemned
+as vigorously as the billboard. And today, tell me, anybody, anywhere
+what is more beautiful in all the world than the dancing lights of
+Market Street at night. In what a unique and vital way they express the
+life of the great modern city.
+
+And anything that expresses Life, whether that life be mediaeval or the
+life of the machine age, that is Art. There.
+
+How pleased everyone is to know that the pretty Palmolive girl who “kept
+her girl complexion” is married and has a sweet little daughter who has
+inherited her mother’s skin.
+
+I don’t always take the posters seriously. Now, I don’t believe that
+that man “would walk a mile for a Camel.” He’d borrow one first. And
+“contented cows.” Cows are always contented. All I’ve known. But they
+may have had bolshevikish notions recently, cud strikes, perhaps. Hence
+the accent on “contented cows,” to reassure us that there is no “Red”
+ propaganda in the milk. Then, there is the parrot; what a long time it
+takes to teach him to say “Gear-ardelly.” And that sentimental touch,
+“If pipes could talk.” They do.
+
+Sometimes, in an absent-minded way, I get them confused, movies and
+merchandise, and find myself wondering who’s starring in “Nucoa.” Then
+there’s that ecclesiastical looking party, the patron of Bromo-Quinine,
+whom I always take for some bearded movie star.
+
+But to return to their artistic merits, they are artistic. Take those
+same “contented cows.” What could be more futurist than the coal black
+sky under which they so contentedly graze? Or the henna hills so
+far away, or the purple grass they chew. Matisse and Picasso, great
+modernists, could not out-do those cows.
+
+The cigarette men are particularly interesting. A bit over done. One
+cannot help wonder what enthusiasm they would have left for a gorgeous
+sunset having spent so much on, a cigarette. But I expect they are good
+men at heart and not so sensuous as they appear. There’s that jolly old
+boy who hasn’t had such a good smoke in sixty years. One wonders if his
+teeth are his own. They all have teeth. Everyone has teeth these days.
+It would be a change to see someone on a billboard with his mouth shut.
+
+
+
+
+Golden Gate Park
+
+
+Enter slowly, by foot is much the better way, and join the long,
+loitering procession.
+
+Black-green foliage, the curious old-green of trees that never wither
+and never resurrect. Something very foreign or is it San Francisco?
+Cubist effects of the horizontally-lined cypress, vertical lines of the
+eucalyptus, and the soft, down-dropping of the willow trees and pepper.
+
+Women on the benches tatting, reading, resting. A retired Kansan widower
+passes, glances sidewise. Well, no harm in looking at a comely woman.
+Gossip of mothers over baby carriages, “Only nine months old! Mine is a
+year. Well, we think he’s pretty fine.”
+
+Comes the sight-seeing bus. Blare of the megaphone. “Seventeen miles of
+driveway, boost, boast, greatest in the world.”
+
+All day long the swings are swinging, rhythmic, slow to the touch of
+loving hands. Then at night when all is still and dark, they go on
+swinging dream children, rhythmic, slow.
+
+Down the slide into the soft sand. Grandpa tending Nellie’s children:
+“Careful there.” Ding, ding like the sound of a temple bell the
+whirling, dizzy iron rings clang against their iron pole. Tramp of the
+patient little burros. “Mother, I want another cone.”
+
+Bum-ti-bum, too-too-too, ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-tahh, the band. Wagner by
+request. Music lovers in the crowd. A symphony orchestra is very fine,
+but simple people like ourselves, we also love a band.
+
+I’ve never been to Japan, but this must be the way it looks. Tinkle of
+the wind bells, petals of Cherry floating down. Sorry, but I’ve used the
+last of the films. Well, we’ll come again.
+
+The bears, the big brown grizzlies, leave them now. Out, what is this!
+Fairyland of flowers and fragrance. Bears and orchids, wise planned
+contrast.
+
+People with accumulative minds wander through the museum, very
+interesting, “Just look at this mosaic, John.” Exhibit of modern art in
+the gallery. “Portrait of a girl,” only a daub to the wayfaring man.
+
+Lovers in secluded places stealing a kiss, caught by the middle-aged.
+“Silly young things,” wistfully.
+
+Once all parks were private grounds. Free now to the poorest serf. Well,
+there’s something century-gained. Some people say the world’s growing
+worse all the time. Perhaps, perhaps....
+
+Who cares. Lying flat on your back close to the smell of the earth, the
+great kind mother. Up, up at the sky, how deep, how blue. Is there a
+God? There must be Something; look at each perfect blade of grass. An
+airplane across the blue. There’s something gained.
+
+Automobiles in stately procession proud as horses ever were. Automobiles
+proudly rolling, swings swinging, people passing, and the swimming of
+all the water fowls, the swans, the Japanese ducks and the little mud
+hens. Infinitude of movement, infinitude of life, ineffable beauty.
+There must be a God. There must be Something back of it all.
+
+
+
+
+Extra Fresh
+
+
+Some one in San Francisco keeps hens. Not only hens, but a rooster. I
+distinctly heard him crow. It was in the very early morning, and like
+Tennyson’s “Queen of the May”--lying broad awake--“I did not hear the
+dog howl, mother, but I did hear this crow.”
+
+It is Ralph Waldo Trine, I think, who says that “So long as there
+remaineth in it the crow of a cock or the lay of a hen a city is not
+a city.” But I would not base the citifiedness of a city upon the mere
+crow of a cock any more than on the census. It is a vulgar criterion.
+
+For human nature is human nature and nothing betrays human nature like
+hens. It is not surprising, therefore, that some woman has sneaked
+into the city limits a mess of hens. Neither is it an aspersion on the
+police.
+
+Besides this was to be about eggs.
+
+Has anyone noticed how eggs of late years are never just eggs, but
+classified? The hens seem to lay them classified. There are hen eggs and
+pullet eggs and large hen eggs and small hen eggs and large pullet eggs
+and small pullet eggs and strictly fresh eggs and ranch eggs and choice
+eggs and large dark eggs and all-mixed eggs and fresh cracked eggs and
+mixed color eggs and small brown and, oh, hundreds of sub-divisions.
+
+The very latest I noticed were “dirty” eggs, 2 cents cheaper. I look
+next for “small dirty eggs.” Why should they sound so unrefined? More
+so some way than “small dirty boys.” But an artist must paint life as
+he sees it and I saw these “dirty” eggs on that bazaar--and bizarre--of
+diversities--Fillmore street.
+
+On Haight street I saw “extra fresh eggs” and how an egg can be more
+than “fresh” I fail to see. Now, a man may be “extra fresh,” but an
+egg is different. Even if it left the hen early it would still be only
+“fresh.” Well, the grocer probably knows.
+
+Every adjective he uses has its significance. Take “ranch” eggs, how
+pastoral they sound and fanned by fresh zephyrs. The same with “yard”
+ eggs, such an “out in the open--let the rest of the world go by”
+ impression they confer. And so reassuring, too, as though they couldn’t
+have been manufactured for Woolworth’s.
+
+There is much, I find, to be written about eggs.
+
+Isn’t it “up-looking,” as Mr. Wilson would say, that they are so cheap
+now?
+
+I cannot help wondering if that woman’s hens--the hens that went with
+the crow--if they laid well when eggs were so high.
+
+
+
+
+On the California-Street Car
+
+
+She was a little black girl about four years old, riding with her mother
+on the observation seat of the California street car. She was a little
+black girl and didn’t know the difference--she might have been as white
+as milk for all she knew. She was poor but daintily dressed beside being
+very neat.
+
+The rest of us in the car were grown-up and white--well-dressed people
+who looked as though we knew a lot. We were all riding along; we and the
+little black girl with her mother, when suddenly we came out from
+the surrounding wall of apartment houses into the open, facing a side
+street--.
+
+And there before us, in all its morning glory, lay the great city of
+Saint Francis. It was just emerging out of fog. The smoke and steam
+rising, touched into color by the sun, softened it into a great mystery
+with forms and hulks coming into relief through the mists. For a moment
+it wasn’t a city but a magnificent singing of the morning.
+
+In a dull, inert way I suppose all of us, the grownup people, glimpsed
+some of its beauty. But we were all intent upon the business of the
+day--we didn’t look out very far--.
+
+But the little black girl who didn’t know any better, the little black
+girl raised her two arms above her head and exclaimed in a high, joyous
+child voice--“GEE WHIZ!”
+
+
+
+
+Western Yarns
+
+
+The men around the corner store at home were forever telling stories
+about the big yarns that Were told in the West. One of the favorites
+was that ancient one of the Western town that was so healthy they had to
+kill a man to start a graveyard.
+
+Having been brought up on this tradition of Western yarns, I have been
+surprised since living here never to have heard a single story that
+didn’t sound perfectly reasonable. But it has dawned on me recently that
+the “Yarns” are true. Therefore, they are no longer yarns, but facts.
+
+Here is an oil boom story I heard first-hand the other day. I believe
+it, but you couldn’t get those men around the corner store to believe
+it--.
+
+It was in a dusty town where everyone rushed in to make quick money and
+never mind about the main street even if they did have to plough through
+dust to their knees. Then one day a heavy rain came that made the street
+one slough of soft oozy clay which no one could cross.
+
+Then enters the hero. Even while they stood dismayed, gazing at each
+other across the clay, he appeared with a mud sled and took them all
+across for 50 cents a passenger and $1 if you had a bundle.
+
+Now, I believe it. Didn’t I see the man who had been there and paid his
+four-bits to cross? Imagine, if you can, though, trying to make those
+Yankees around the corner store believe that there was a town where one
+had to pay 50 cents to cross a narrow country road in a mud sled.
+
+I believed a man who told me a story down in Kern County last summer. We
+were riding over the desert and I asked the stage driver the name of
+a low yellow bush that grows down there. He was an interesting fellow,
+that stage driver, who had been a buccaroo all his life and apparently
+knew all about the sage brush country. And when he didn’t know he was
+not lacking in an answer. I like a man like that. Answer, I say, whether
+you know or not.
+
+He said with great assurance that the little, low, yellow bush was
+“Mexican saddle blanket” or “Tinder bush,” this last because it burns
+like tinder in the fall of the year.
+
+“Why, that bush is so dry,” he said, “that once when I lighted it to
+cook my bacon for breakfast it traveled so fast that by the time my
+bacon was cooked I was five miles from camp.”
+
+I laughed--I couldn’t help it when I imagined that six-footer traveling
+across the desert with a frying pan over that low bush. I laughed
+because it was so real to me, but he misunderstood, and said so sort of
+hurt, “Don’t you believe me?”
+
+And I told him I did. And I did. And I do. Five miles isn’t a great
+distance to travel over the desert after one’s bacon.
+
+
+
+
+Mr. Mazzini and Dante
+
+
+Mr. Mazzini will never be rich. He takes too much time for philosophy
+and gossiping with the women, and he loves a joke too well, and his
+heart is too kind. He is a universal type, as old as the world is old,
+Theocritus knew him well.
+
+“You pick me out some good cantaloupes,” I said with deadly tact, and
+Mr. Mazzini answered that it couldn’t be done and that melons were like
+men, that there was no sure way of picking them out for their kindness
+of heart. Then he took time over the melons to tell me how his mother in
+Italy, who was evidently something of a match-maker, had gotten fooled
+on a young man who was both “laze” and “steenge” in his youth but who
+made a very good husband.
+
+One day it was figs, and I was strong for the nice appearing ones,
+but Mr. Mazzini told me a lot about figs and chose me some that were
+lop-sided from packing. What delicious figs they were, all stored with
+sunshine and sweetness and flavor just as he had told me. Mr. Mazzini
+owns his own store, and yet when he throws in a few extra, as he always
+does, because they are soft or a little specked, he will wink and glance
+slyly around just as though he were putting one over on the boss.
+
+One morning I saw him sweeping out his store and he wore a woman’s
+sweeping cap with the strings tied under his grisly old chin. When I saw
+him I just stood and laughed aloud, and he asked me why not, and said
+that a sweeping cap was just as good for a man as for a woman, and then
+he stopped his sweeping and gave me quite a male feminist talk. And
+he has a horse, Mr. Mazzini has, a fat old plug that peeks around his
+blinders as humorously as his master. Oh, I could just keep on talking
+about Mr. Mazzini for pages, but I started to speak of Dante.
+
+I like the Italians and I like the Latin quarter where they live. I like
+it better than Ashbury Heights for instance. I like the way the Italians
+use their windows to look out of and to lean out of, and I like the way
+they have socialized the sidewalk. It’s all a matter of taste, and I
+wouldn’t criticize the people of Ashbury Heights simply because they use
+their well-curtained windows only to admit the light, and do not lean
+out and gossip with their neighbors and yell to their children, “Mahree,
+Mahree,” nor sit out on their steps in the evening and play Rigoletto on
+the accordion. It’s all a matter of taste.
+
+Six hundred years ago Dante was an Italian, but he is much more than
+that today. After six centuries Dante belongs to all those and only
+those who can read him with appreciation and pleasure. Our scavenger
+is an Italian, and he reads Dante just as so many of the Anglo Saxon
+proletair read Shakespeare. So Dante belongs to this garbage man,
+not because he is Italian, but because he sincerely loves the Divina
+Commedia. A waiter, in Il Trovatore, a rarely honest man, acknowledged
+to me that he could not read Dante, and that every time he tried he got
+mad and threw the book away.
+
+Dante belongs to the literary elect of all nations, Dante belongs to the
+great internationale of the immortals. Dante belongs to Eternity. And
+for that matter so does Mr. Mazzini.
+
+
+
+
+On the Nob of Nob Hill
+
+
+On the very nob of Nob Hill there is the ruin of a mansion which was the
+Whittell home. In ruins it still is a mansion. In ruins it is grander
+than any place around because it belonged to the grand days.
+
+There is an enclosed garden in the rear after the fashion of old Spanish
+gardens in Monterey. And between the boards that cover a door in the
+high wall, one may peek and catch a glimpse of hollyhocks in a row and
+roses running wild, trellises of green lattice and ghosts of beautiful
+ladies having afternoon tea.
+
+To one side of the mansion there is a formal garden that hugs up close
+to the ivy-covered walls of the house. It is such a garden as one sees
+in elaborately illustrated copies of Mother Goose “with silver bells and
+cockle shells.” It’s so beautiful that it doesn’t seem real. California
+gardens are like that, and to those of us from bleak countries they look
+like pictures out of books. There is this well-groomed garden of the
+living present hugging up close to the ruins of yesterday and then, if
+you please, Mother Nature, with her penchant for whimsy, has grown right
+up against these two a riot of purple and gold lupine, a product of her
+own unaided husbandry.
+
+I am not much on allegory nor sermonizing, but I declare San Francisco
+gets me started. And when walking along about one’s business, one
+sees such a vivid picture, the allegory forces itself. The grandeur of
+yesterday, the serious beauty of today, and then the wild flowers that
+covered the hills before man interfered and will live on after man has
+gone into dust to make new flowers.
+
+Such a contemplation would make some people blue but it gives me a
+feeling of something basic and secure and eternal in all this strange
+puzzle of life. It was a beautiful day up there on the tip-toe of Nob
+Hill. What a beautiful view they must have had from the mansion windows.
+The same sky and the same banks of heavy soft white clouds. And Job,
+that mysterious man of the Bible, must have looked up at just such a sky
+when those stern questions came to him:
+
+“Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare if
+thou hast understanding.
+
+“Dost thou know the balancings of the clouds, the wondrous works of Him
+that is perfect in knowledge?”
+
+“Hast thou with Him spread out the sky, which is strong, and as a molten
+looking glass?”
+
+The nob of Nob Hill, how close it is to the sky.
+
+
+The Leighton Press San Francisco, Cal
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg’s Vignettes Of San Francisco, by Almira Bailey
+
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