Part 11

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.