Category Archives: history

Streets of the Modern Wild West

history, odds and ends, the language

In my neighborhood there is a residential street named Filament. When we were first house-hunting here I thought how humiliating, to have to have one’s address be on “Filament Street.” That is not bad at all, I have now discovered.

How would you like to live on Deny Court? I’m not sure if I’d prefer to live there rather than on, say, Pretentious Way. I’d like it better if it were Denial Ct–that is something I can get my mind around, and most people who live in houses have to be personally familiar with the attitude.

In any case, I’d consider it risky to look for a house to buy, in some of the areas of Greater Sacramento where these and other strange names for streets are found. I might fall in love with a house on Elude Ct., and if it were a bargain, I would feel a lot of pressure to sell my literary soul for it. Do good deals tend to come up more often on streets with names like Image, Essence, Adorn and Agree? Perhaps if the quality for which the street is name is positive, like Esteem Ct. or Acclaim Dr., the houses cost more, not less.

Are the houses on Pretentious Way really so? Or are the people who live in them? Perhaps the residents are only illiterate foreigners. Forgive me, but I really can’t imagine. Many questions present themselves, such as, What sort of qualifications does one need to be a street-namer? I suspect that the naming agency nowadays pulls words out of the dictionary by means of a computer database.

As I think about it, many if not most street names that we are used to are concrete nouns, or common or proper names after plants and people, places or events. When you start having words for intangibles, or verbs and modifiers, it is bucking the sensible tradition and causes confusion in the mind every time you turn into your lane.

I didn’t like it when streets in new developments were called “Mountain Ave” or such like, even though there was no elevation even in sight. But at least we know what a mountain is, and it is a simple concrete and neutral thing.

But to live on Proper or Refined or Benevolent: it does sound as though the street, or the houses– or the people?–are being described. I don’t like that. These are all the true names of real residential streets I am listing!

Streets with number or letter names should be considered more, if they are running out of ideas. The picture is of the road on which my childhood home was located, and it had a number for a name. But this is the age when a lot of people make up new names for their children, and perhaps that is the next thing to look for in street names. It will happen in California.

There are also streets named for general categories. The typical School Street or University Ave usually refer to a specific example that is nearby, but one doesn’t usually run across Savant Drive any more than you would see a street named for houses, students, or cars. We might just as well have a street named Avenue, though I didn’t see that one. I did see Component Way, which goes into the same pocket of my mind as Filament Ct.

This aspect of our culture is so vast and jumbled, I am getting more confused and bored as I ramble on. Let me just say that if have to move to Sacramento, the street I will look on is Clarity Court.

An Olive Tree is More Than Interesting

art, church, history, nature, Pascha, travel, trees

In a recent post I said that my birthday olive tree was “an interesting gift.” I suppose it was because I was dead tired that I couldn’t think of a more telling word. I’m embarrassed to use such an uninteresting word as interesting. Ugh. The truth is, to receive the gift of an olive tree on the occasion of getting older made a huge impression on me. If I hadn’t needed to finish that post quickly and make dinner…well, enough of the excuses.

I love to look at these trees, so as I was browsing them on the Internet I pasted some pictures here. Vincent Van Gogh painted several scenes of olives.

A post about olive trees was one of the first in my string of blogs. And recently on my tree-rich trip I saw old California orchards. My childhood was near the groves that made Lindsay Ripe Olives famous, though as I have mentioned, I don’t like the fruits, and my family never had an olive tree on our property. Olive oil gelato? Very West-Coast, and I would be willing to give that a try.

You can adopt an olive tree growing in Italy, like the one at top, and then receive its produce for a year. I suppose you have to adopt it, or a different one, again the next year. Not very good parenting.

Montenegro is the home of this pocked giant, which is reputed to be 2000 years old. The longevity intrigues me, along with all the Biblical references, which I haven’t even begun to think about. Mention of them often goes along with general descriptions of abundance and productivity of gardens, and with pomegranates and figs and vineyards.

There’s a story of the olive tree who was asked to be king, and the olive branch in the dove’s mouth after The Flood. Doors for the Temple were carved in olive wood. Many people make reference to it being the tree of Peace, and God knows I need that–I need Him.

What does it mean, “I am like a green olive plant in the house of my God.” ?  It means alive, if it is green. Let me flourish in Your House, O Lord. Let me live in You.

Getting back to the trees themselves, the grove I would most like to visit is this idyllic one in Turkey , the fifth-largest seller of olive oil in the world– but trying to get to second place. Olive oil I do much appreciate, and can imagine having a picnic on the warm yellow grass, of bread dipped in oil, sitting on a blanket under the sun. Once during my sojourns in that very country, I helped women in shalvar* gather olives from the ground where they’d fallen. I even sampled one of the wrinkly brined olives they cured in flat pans spread around under the trees, and had to restrain myself from immediately spitting it out.

*(I tried in vain to find a picture of these baggy pants that so many women still wore in Turkey in the 60’s and 70’s. These days a version has become high fashion, and the ones worn by chic models are not the ones I saw and wore. Perhaps this will be be the subject of a future post.)


The Garden of Gethsemane figures prominently in the events of our salvation history, into which we entered last week through the services and events leading up to Pascha. And this tree lives there. What if it is also 2,000 years old?

I planned to post this blog before Pascha, but now here we are post-Gethsemane, post-Golgotha. Wherever olive trees, any trees, are living, this week they are dancing.

Meeting on the Bike Path

history, nature, people

A brisk walk before 7:00 a.m. was just what I needed, I thought as I pulled on my clothes and quietly left the house yesterday morning. There was frost on the rooftops as I headed down the street to the bike/walking path a block away.

No sooner had I reached it but I overtook my neighbor and his dog, whom I’ve seen walking these paths for over a decade. Our relationship demonstrates the way friendship sometimes develops by baby steps, or maybe I could call them old-man-walking-old-dog-steps.

I don’t remember him from the first five years that we lived about six houses down from his, though I spent a lot of time on our wonderful paths that run along all the creeks through town. We were both busier, I suspect, and moving faster.

Ten or fifteen years ago I started noticing him with his dog. The dog was never in a hurry, and the man hunched a bit and shuffled, stopping and starting to avoid stumbling over his companion. He didn’t often look up at me when I drove past or when I met them strolling the other direction, but if he did, we would smile at each other.

A few years later I got a chance to speak to him a couple of times, and I told him that I lived just down the street. I didn’t say anything about how his yard was always neglected and full of tall weeds. Earlier on I had thought of bringing him cookies or offering to do some yard work, but once or twice I did see a woman there who I thought to be his daughter. Maybe it was she who planted some petunias one spring.

On this day, I had my perfect opportunity. Our relationship had progressed through the smile stage, into the speaking stage, and now, it seemed natural to slow my pace to theirs and say, “Good morning!” We started talking about his dog with the beautiful champagne-colored coat, a French sheepdog he’d gotten at the pound 14 years ago. “His name was Ben when we got him, but I changed it to Spunky.”

Somehow the conversation turned to politics–it wasn’t my doing! I walked alongside and followed their route, across this bridge, at which point Spunky stopped, changed direction, and was ready to go back more in the direction of home. That was as far as was his usual, his owner said. The whole hour I was with them I had to watch out for the leash and dog as they kept crisscrossing the path.

My friend told me about his childhood in Pittsburgh, PA, how he realized that if he didn’t leave shortly after high school, he’d be working in the factory forever. So he left, and he joined the Army, and traveled, but didn’t fight in Korea after all. His traveling gave him a different and broader perspective on the world from the average person, he believed. He recommended that I read The Economist, and told me about the three periodicals he reads to help him decide what companies to invest in.

Old men are often fun to talk to, especially if they like to talk about their lives and will carry the conversation. Then I can just show my interest and listen. Often they have a refreshingly old-fashioned outlook that I rarely encounter anymore. My neighbor doesn’t care that his jeans have a hole in the knee, or that his jacket is dirty. He had enough manners to pause in his story and ask a question about me or what I thought, but he wasn’t pushy if I didn’t talk much.

Eventually we got back to his house, and stood in the driveway for another ten minutes chatting about the Middle East and other places he had visited, and about how he has lived in that house for 38 years. I pointed out my house. He looked at Spunky, who had settled down to rest on the pavement, and said, “I have to get him inside,” but just before that I had introduced myself and found out that the man’s name is Ray.

My time was used up, it was nearly 8 o’clock, so I just walked quickly around the block and went home to tell B. about my new friend.

Trains and Stations

books, history, travel, ,

Lying in bed at night as a child, I used to hear trains pass less than a mile away, as the whistle blew at the intersection where I also would catch the school bus in the mornings. We were out in the middle of citrus orchards, on a dead-end road, so there was little else to hear at night. The coyote howling was a different tone from the locomotive’s warning. Now that my daughter lives where trains toot-toot as they go by many times throughout the day and night, I find that the sound still strikes a chord of comfort and regularity.

While we are busy about our work and play and sleep, thousands of people are being diligent to do their jobs driving the trains, loading them, keeping the schedules updated, whatever all is necessary. I know so little about it, it’s like magic.

Books I enjoyed with my children fed this romantic feeling I have: The Little Red Caboose, The Boxcar Children, The Railway Children, even The Narnia Chronicles with its train trips here and there during holiday. Children and trains.

When I was still a young child I was allowed to ride the Santa Fe with just my two sisters, four hours to my grandmother’s house, which no doubt also makes me love trains, and the train stations just as much. Excitement and heightened emotion pervade these meeting places of people who might be returning from exotic and faraway lands, or perhaps are just now being reconciled face-to-face with kinfolk after years of estrangement….One never knows all the stories, one hardly knows all that churns in one’s own heart at meeting one’s own people.

When I rode the train, it was to visit my most dearly beloved maternal grandparents. I can see in my mind’s eye, just as I saw them from the train window before they could see me, Grandma and Grandpa, standing in the crowd waiting for us. We climbed down the steps and went to them, and got a kiss, and Grandma’s warm hands in ours (those were the days before hugging was expected), and her remarking how cold my own hands were.

There is mention of British trains and stations, even Victoria Station, on this blog recently. I’ve been on some British trains, and the last time I was on that island, my hotel was quite near Victoria Station, which was awfully modernized from the first time, and certainly a different world from what lives in my memory and heart’s imagination. When you can’t even throw your own trash away, but must hand it to someone walking around in a sort of spacesuit, it feels like a new age, and not of flower children.

One recent sight jived with the old world, though. Driving through the mountains of forests last week, I looked down the wooded slope at a railroad track snaking along a river, and thought I caught a glimpse of the little red caboose.