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.