We had one more brief visit to make before heading home, and that was at San Francisco, where our niece Paula works as an expert draftsman for a shipbuilding concern, and does art work, her real heart interest, on the side. This is the same niece who long ago lost her little white shoe in the corn field, some of you perhaps will remember. Another niece, Elizabeth, called Obit, by the family because that is how the little ones used to pronounce her name, has just settled in san Francisco, too, with a pharmaceutical firm, after completing her scholarship and getting her advanced degree in bacteriology and stuff at the University of Southern California. As luck would have it, her firm chose this very week to send her back to the campus for some research work. If it had been a week earlier, we could have seen her while we were in Santa Barbara. As it was, she would be speeding south by train at the very time we were going north by car. So we talked by long-distance Sunday and made that do.
Then on Monday morning we set out northward from Santa Barbara. It makes you realize the size of the state when it takes you a whole day to get from there to San Francisco, and that is only about a quarter of the length of California. On the way we stopped to call on a cousin of our mother's who resembles her so much that it seemed almost like a reincarnation. The same build the same quick sweet smile, the same gentle ways. It was an experience both sweet and sad. She lives in San Luis Obispo, where another of the famous missions is located, so we took time to drive around it though it was too early for visiting the interior. It is the mission our mother considered the nicest of all. Later, by the way, we stopped at San Migual mission and wandered through its quiet garden and burial ground, and climbed the narrow, winding rock staircase to the beautiful bell tower, three bells in three arches. So we have now seen five of the series of missions and hope some day to see the rest.
We mentioned the brilliant flowers and green lawns of Santa Barbara, and admired the same things in all the towns we traversed, and yet the big over-all impression we carry away of California, it seems, is that endless succession of great smoothly rolling tawny hills, with live-oaks against them. That is what we saw most of the day's trip northward. We took route 101 which is somewhat inland, and felt that we had a good chance to see the country. There is a road, route 1, closer to the sea, and we wished we might have traveled both.
It got cooler and windier as we went up-country, and in late afternoon as we approached San Francisco, it struck us as a White City. If Rome was built on seven hills, San Francisco must be built on twenty-seven. And all the houses on different levels stacked up against each other like the white dominoes. When we got into the city it seemed as though the buildings all rose straight up from the pavements. They have large and lovely park areas, and no doubt residential parts where there are lawns and trees, but the general impression going through the city is strictly of white buildings rising from wide steep streets. The place is not only hilly but is so ingeniously contrived that you always seem to approach a stop-light at a very steep place and you fairly hold your breath hoping the light will change and you can get under way again before you roll back. Unless you see it, you can hardly imagine how any city could manage to have every street on an incline. At the intersections it seems as though all four ways drop away from you, and that is odd, for you must have to be at the bottom of the hill somewhere.
Anyway, the whole atmosphere of the place is invigorating. It didn't seem to be feverishly active, and yet everyone seemed alert and had a sparkle in the eye.
We found Paula's place with no trouble, in time for dinner. She is much more pleasantly situated than many career girls, who sometimes have to live in a room-and-a-half apartment. She lives on the second floor of one of the big old San Francisco residences, with a young widow about her own age and her 3-year-old son. Just to show you how much room they have; across the front, a large living room and a bedroom; then in succession, another bedroom, Peter's bedroom and playroom, a dining room, kitchen, utility room, and a sun deck. No motels for us this night, there was room to spare.
After dinner Paula thought it would be nice for us to see Fisherman's Wharf and on the way walk through a block or two of Chinatown. We asked if we needed wraps, and she said always after five you do. We found out she was absolutely right. After wondering for a week why we had cumbered ourselves with extra clothing and wraps, we found out. We went into wool suits at San Francisco and stayed in them till the last day of the trip.
We didn't use the car, for you haven't "done" San Francisco unless you have ridden the famous cable cars. So we walked over a couple of blocks and caught the one on California street and rode clear to the top of Nob Hill, past the well-known Mark Hopkins hotel. Leaving the car, we turned into Grant street, which is Chinatown. It was lined with bright, cheerful retail shops, busy with tourist customers. We were still wandering from store to store, marveling at the low prices and deciding what to buy when we came to a Chinese movie theater and thought how much fun it would be to see a picture in a foreign language. So we went in and saw the picture through, with all its strange sights and sounds, and when it was over we all had extraordinarily different ideas of the plot. It took us hours of discussion later, off and on, to clear up some points. David claimed we had seen the same thing through three times, but then he was bored to begin with. We found it quite an experience and we had much more sympathy for foreigners in a strange land than we ever had before.
One of the queerest incidents had nothing to do with the screen. We sat in a front row of seats where an aisle crossed in front of us. There were many little children in the theater and they kept trotting back and forth, even as yours and mine. At one time a couple of pretty little Chinese girls about 4 years old started to scamper across in front of us but looked up at us and shied off like frightened colts, drew back a couple of steps and stared at us in a sort of horror and finally slunk past as far from us as they could get. Imagine that! They thought we were the foreigners! Oh, well, "all are odd but thee and me, and even thee is a little odd."
We never did get to Fisherman's Wharf.
In fact, we almost didn't get home. It was ten when we went into the show, midnight when we came out. And these cable cars don't seem to run so frequently after that. We went a block this way and a block that but finally got on a car. It was so sparsely filled that a warning sign was visible that we hadn't noticed before: Passengers Must Hold on at Curve. About the time we noticed it, the conductor called out the same words, and the car took a curve so smartly that we were practically wrapped twice around the posts we grabbed. Or anyway once-and-a-half. We mentioned that this was an invigorating place. The folks who ride these cars get the equivalent of a brisk osteopathic treatment on every trip. Not only up hill and down, but around bends.
Next morning after a leisurely breakfast we set out on a day that was to be a wonderful experience. We saw a lot but were not rushing to see everything. We had no sense of hurry and we had plenty of time to talk and visit. Using David's car this time, we first went to Telegraph Hill where we could see the whole city from the top of the tower, including the bay and the bridges and Alcatraz and all. Then we drove sightseeing through parts of the city, getting into several dead-end streets by mistake. It is a place where one could browse for weeks and always find something new. We drove around in a rich residential district, Belvedere, seems to me they said it was an island but if so, don't aks me how we got to it. We went over the Golden Gate bridge to Tiburon and there we had a leisurely early dinner at Sam's Anchor Cafe, right on the edge of the water. We looked out our window straight across the bay toward the Mark Hopkins hotel and Telegraph Hill, where we had been earlier. In the blue water we watched outboard motor boats, sailboats and palatial cabin cruisers. We lingered a long while over our meal, the most expensive and in some ways the most satisfying of the trip, and then we drove down to Muir Woods to see the big trees, since we didn't have time to go to Yosemite. Then in the twilight we went back over Golden Gate and so home to coffee and ice cream and more visiting.
As we crossed Golden Gate bridge that last time, the girls remarked cheerfully that it was a great place for suicides. It seemed to have a fatal attraction for the depressed. And next norming we saw by the paper that within thirty minutes of the time we went across, the 141st suicide had leaped to his death. He had driven to the middle of the bridge, got out of his car, locked it and put the keys in his pocket, before he jumped. Such is the power of habit. If he had only thought, since he was determined to end it all, he could have made one last gesture of courtesy by leaving the keys in the ignition for the convenience of the police.
This incident just shows how we seemed to travel in a sort of vacuum of safety. We were not on any accidents and we did not even see any happen, but we would read in the paper of tragedies of various sorts happening at the very places we had been or were going. Like back at Pacific, Missouri, when we watched some airplanes overhead with mild interest and didn't know till night that they were trying to spot an escaped convict in the woods, and police cars and officers were all about us seeking. And later, in Arizona, folks were running off the highway and falling into canyons. And still later, in Nevada and Utah, two escaped convicts were on the loose and suspected of trying to hitch-hike to safety. One of them was tall and blonde, the other short and swarthy. We made it a rule to pick up no hikers at any time, but we imagined we saw those two convicts, alone and together, at least a dozen times along the highway, trying to thumb a ride. Since we got home, we have read in the papers that one of them is still supposed to be at large in salt Lake city. We get in on the fringes of excitement, but fate seems to have ordained for us a placid life.
It was a joy to have little Peter with us all that day. He is just 3, like our little Mike, and as blonde as Mike is dark. But it was amusing to see that they liked exactly the same jokes and games and stories, and liked equally well to be cuddled by Gram and Aunt Margi. It made us homesick for our own little ones and we were quite willing to start for home and step along lively. -- Hope.
Memory Gem
A physiologist says a nose is nine-tenths for breathing and one-tenth for smelling. That leaves nothing at all for sticking into other folks' business.
Memory Gem
By the time she is the mother of four or five, a woman is no longer irked by the noise of the children. It is the prolonged silence that stirs her dark doubts.