You live in San Francisco and I live in San Francisco, and so does the
man who owns the peanut wagon on the corner, and none of us live in
the same San Francisco--funny. We’re like the blind men who each gave a
different version of the elephant.
To some, San Francisco is always eight o’clock in the morning or six
o’clock at night, swinging on the straps homeward, swallow their dinners
and to a show in the evening. Such people never have wandered through
Golden Gate Park of an afternoon or sunned themselves on the benches of
Union Square. They have never seen San Francisco by week-day sunlight.
Then there are home women and leisure women to whom San Francisco is
always afternoon, down-town in the shopping district with ladies in
pretty clothes passing each other on the street or in and out of the
sweet-scented stores.
To some, San Francisco is always night. A taxi-driver who used to be a
newsboy down on the old Barbary Coast. He has never seen anything but
the night life of the city. Not bad, but night provincial--a sort of
male version of Trilby.
The neighborhood of Merchants Exchange on California Street is San
Francisco to hundreds of men. They ride out to the golf links and into
the country on Sunday. Occasionally they go to New York, but when they
return San Francisco is limited to the neighborhood where men inquire
anxiously--“Is she picking up any in the East?”
No matter how wealthy, no matter how poor, to each of us San Francisco
is very much limited in the confines of what each of us is interested
in. It’s funny when you stop to think about it. How the Master of
Marionettes must laugh at us when he sees us together. Perhaps some
night after the show, the traffic cop raises his imperial hand and
there, waiting to pass, the taxi driver of the night and a dear little
home woman with her husband, and Mr. Chamber-of-Commerce and close to
him a man who has never seen San Francisco by week day sunlight. There
they all wait looking out of their eyes on San Francisco and each seeing
it so differently.
San Francisco is one thing to you and another thing to me and something
entirely different to the man on the peanut stand.