The first house we bought, my wife and I, was small. Two rooms and one bath. But we had not bought it for size. We had fallen for the garden. There were two orange trees, a Valencia and a Navel. There was a lath house full of fuchsias. We had a jasmine bush and several deciduous trees around a lawn. The small living room had a picture window looking out on this little paradise of ours.
Clearly, other people feel the same way about the beauty, even the necessity, of flowers, fruit, and greenery. Many a community prides itself of being the “Garden City” of the West or East or whatever. But as sure as variety can be said to be the spice of life there are also those, bless them, who go for the clean shave: some concrete to step on, a pool, and a few pots with geraniums and voilá, the perfect “garden”.
We occasionally chatted with our neighbors over the back fence. I remember the lady praising us for the beautiful garden we maintained. But her folks, she admitted, just were not garden people. “We are car people”, she once said, “from Detroit”. As she said that she motioned with her arms to indicate the three half-disassembled automobiles that were the only ornaments on her side of the fence. I have often thought of this episode, reflecting on the fact that people so much alike in many ways can yet be so different at the same time.
On a visit to Paris the first thing we saw in Parc Monceau, a lovely green spot in the 8th arrondissement, was a statue of the novelist Alfred de Musset. That same day my wife stumbled upon a statue of the dramatist Beaumarchais on rue St. Antoine near the Opera Bastille. On the Left Bank we found a bust of Chateaubriand, the first of the Romantics. Then we noticed that the offices of Air France were located on place Rostand, author of Cyrano de Bergerac, a play written in 1897 and last turned into a movie in 1950. North of the Marais was the blvd. Voltaire and near the Étoile, the rue Balzac. We found a rue Chenier and an allee Cendrars, not to forget a rue Hugo and a square Zola. It was quite obvious that in Paris poets, dramatists, and novelists are kept in high esteem. As we searched some more we found that all Parisian streets have names and that at least 175 of them are named for writers.
I do not know about Boston or New York, but on a map of Los Angeles I found only seven streets named for men of letters. As far as I was able to determine Willa Cather, James Fenimore Cooper, Emily Dickinson, William Faulkner, Robert Frost, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Edgar Allan Poe, J.D. Salinger, and Mark Twain, to count off a few prospects, did not make it. Maybe I am reading more into this than is reasonable but I have a suspicion that it says something about our two cities when I tell you that there are at least 650 streets in Los Angeles that have no names, just cold numbers.
(c) 2017 by Herbert H Hoffman
Picture credit: cityroom blogs ny times