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.