Part 8

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