Some Cities roar and others hum, but San Francisco sings. Especially on
Saturday at noon and downtown. Saturday noon in San Francisco is like
nothing else anywhere but Saturday noon in San Francisco. And Saturday
noon is like the noon of no other day but Saturday. On Sunday they’re
off. On Saturday noon everybody’s on the street.
There are more flowers on Saturday noon. On the street stands great
plumes of gold acacia, riots of daffodils, banks of violets, white, waxy
camellias and branches of Japanese peach blossoms. It’s still winter by
the calendar but it’s spring in San Francisco. Everywhere you turn a man
or boy from the country with baskets of the spring flowers. All you
want to carry for two bits and a nice bunch for a dime. Big, fat men and
oldish men with young twinkles in their eyes sell them, unromantic, but
very nice to deal with.
There are the flowers and there are the women. No women in the country
so beautiful. No women in the world wear color as they do. Their colors
are never primitive, never gaudy, but gorgeous and vivid and alive,
seldom do you see a woman dressed in black, and black hats almost never.
Sit in the gallery of any church on Sunday morning when the sun comes
pouring in and it is as though you were looking down on flowers.
Never two alike in the Saturday noon crowd and yet the same type. Free
women, happy women, regular women. Women who can recall a judge or so
and still be graceful and dainty. It is very significant that a San
Francisco woman stands at the very pinnacle of the city, graceful and
alert on that tall slender column in Union Square.
And the Saturday noon men--men?--men? In describing color what can
one say of men? Well, it’s not their fault that they can’t wear pretty
clothes. They make a nice grey background for the women and a very
desirable audience and that’s the best I can do for them.
The street musicians, they contribute a lot to the Saturday noon
atmosphere. And when we drop a penny into their cups, perhaps it is not
so much pity as pay for the joy their piping gives us. And the people
who call papers, of whom the blind are the dearest of all. There’s a
blind man on Powell street who sounds exactly as though he were saying
Mass.
Dearie me, I can’t describe it. All its lilt and rhythm and color and
humanness as well. And ladies walking along with huge white balloons
from the White House as though they had been blowing bubbles from some
great clay pipes. And a plump, rosy Chinese woman so dainty in her
breeches with her shiny, black hair bound in a head dress of jade and
opal and turquoise.
We need more poets.