A short something my dad wrote this morning. Thought some of you might enjoy it:
“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitant are, as the man once said, “whores, pimps, gambler and sons of b*tches,” by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, “Saints and angels and martyrs and holymen” and he would have meant the same thing.”
-Cannery Row by John Steinbeck.
The first paragraph of Steinbeck's Cannery Row. From this beginning Steinbeck sketches then paints the smell and feel of a place and time long since past. Cannery Row is persevered for the ages, Doc and the boys at the palace gain well deserved immortality.
Without Steinbeck they would be only a echo like so many other times and places lost in history, lost not because their notoriety or color did not meet or surpass Doc and the boys, it did, no they are lost because there was no Steinbeck to record them.
I think of my hometown of Lester, of little boys kicking cans down the street fishing poles over their shoulders, old man Selken gaunt and hollow eyed sitting on his porch as we passed. Walking into Slims pool hall on a hot day, the darkness and cool, an old man pushing a single silver dime forward on the old bar in his return getting a foaming glass of beer, dark wood floors, the click of pool balls.
Louie's across the street, the pinball machine dinging. Louie, Hamms beer in hand, telling us boys, for the 20th time in a day to quit sitting on the freezer. And you look back and wonder, how did he keep his patience? Lord knows we tried it.
Mud Creek, how the air seemed so cool and church like under the bridges, pigeons cooing, stick like snapping turtle heads silently poking up.
Butch's general store, always a smile and a story. Fritz's old gas station and the smell of high test while Dad gassed up the Buick and Fritz passed you a sucker from his jar.
In a small town young kids know instinctively who cares and who doesn't, and we reward the Butch's the Louie's, and the the Fritz Brookin's with our memories and a place in our heart long after they are gone.
This Sunday morning I dedicate to all the Cannery Rows that have been and are going to be. For they were and are the very fabric of our lives, and they are everywhere.
“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitant are, as the man once said, “whores, pimps, gambler and sons of b*tches,” by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, “Saints and angels and martyrs and holymen” and he would have meant the same thing.”
-Cannery Row by John Steinbeck.
The first paragraph of Steinbeck's Cannery Row. From this beginning Steinbeck sketches then paints the smell and feel of a place and time long since past. Cannery Row is persevered for the ages, Doc and the boys at the palace gain well deserved immortality.
Without Steinbeck they would be only a echo like so many other times and places lost in history, lost not because their notoriety or color did not meet or surpass Doc and the boys, it did, no they are lost because there was no Steinbeck to record them.
I think of my hometown of Lester, of little boys kicking cans down the street fishing poles over their shoulders, old man Selken gaunt and hollow eyed sitting on his porch as we passed. Walking into Slims pool hall on a hot day, the darkness and cool, an old man pushing a single silver dime forward on the old bar in his return getting a foaming glass of beer, dark wood floors, the click of pool balls.
Louie's across the street, the pinball machine dinging. Louie, Hamms beer in hand, telling us boys, for the 20th time in a day to quit sitting on the freezer. And you look back and wonder, how did he keep his patience? Lord knows we tried it.
Mud Creek, how the air seemed so cool and church like under the bridges, pigeons cooing, stick like snapping turtle heads silently poking up.
Butch's general store, always a smile and a story. Fritz's old gas station and the smell of high test while Dad gassed up the Buick and Fritz passed you a sucker from his jar.
In a small town young kids know instinctively who cares and who doesn't, and we reward the Butch's the Louie's, and the the Fritz Brookin's with our memories and a place in our heart long after they are gone.
This Sunday morning I dedicate to all the Cannery Rows that have been and are going to be. For they were and are the very fabric of our lives, and they are everywhere.
