Part 12

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.