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ambitious_wenchI grew up in Salinas California. I lived on Villa street which ran roughly north south, along the western edge of Central Park. The south end of the street abutted Hartnel College, and ended in a T section with Central street. If I went about 3-4 blocks east on Central, on the left was a stately old victorian. In my time, it was fashionable to pant them white, with little color for trim. I remember when the first restoration investigations took place, and the unbelievable colors they used to paint houses--my grandmother was horrified. "they look like painted ladies, not the stately old grand dames they are!" It was explained to her that these were historic colors, that color analysis of the existing layers of paint verified it. She sniffed. She was probably old enough to remember these old grand dames when they were still being painted this color, but she hated it none the less. She was right--they looked horrible to my color sense. Greens and purples and reds and pinks--all on one house!
Other than that, they it was a fairy tale house; a structure that defied common sense and space utilization. It had an odd little round tower on the south east corner, with a simple little sitting area of low benching running the perimeter of the inside space--and the very glass in the windows was curved as well!
Stories would pop up of a lovely woman who sat in that little round room at the corner of the building, her dark hair piled up like the ladies of old sepia prints in family albums. She always wore white, and you could see her in the day, and sometimes at night through the curved glass of the double-hung windows. I never saw her, myself. But I had friends who said they did--she was the ghost of Steinbeck's mother, they said. Yes, this house was the place where John Steinbeck was born. The story of the lady in white was scoffed at by adults; But I would look at those windows every day for all the years I went to Roosevelt Elementary.
Grandma loved his writings. She especially was touched by "Of Mice and Men", and I remember seeing her cry as she read "The Grapes of Wrath". She once said that the title "The Winter of our Discontent" was taken from the bible; I corrected her and said it was Shakespeare. She laughed and said I was right, but wasn't it a wonderful line anyway? She would speak to the locals about him--and discovered he was persona non-grata. He was a drunk, and horror of horrors, he had the audacity to write about real people in Salinas. "Did he write about you?" she would ask? "No, but he shouldn't have written about anyone here!" was the ubiquitous reply.
She was puzzled by this reaction. "Don't they realize they had a real genius? A prophet is never honored in his own city." I was able to tell her that was from the bible.
Salinas grew up out of the fertile soil of the Salinas Valley, along the --you guessed it, the Salinas River. There is a book called "The Upside Down River", written during the depression to chronicle the history of the town. The Salinas River flows mostly underground, only rising to the surface where the aquifer is too saturated for it to remain below. Hence the name.
Oddly, one of the town's founders was a distant ancestral relative of Grandma's. And mine, I suppose.
Salinas was old enough to have massive pepper trees; Huge, graceful things, with a sharp, pungent smell that made my nose itch. They are stunning trees, really. Their trunks are thick, with large gnarly lumps on them. Yet the shape of them is graceful, with gentle canopies and pleasant shade beneath.
Pepper trees do drop odd little racemes of seeds, which can irritate sensitive mouths. These hard berries are covered with a dry, hot pink papery covering, and the sound of them crunching beneath my feet is something I can remember, and if I close my eyes and think of it for a second, I can smell that itchy fragrance of the trees.
I always think of those trees when I think of Steinbeck. By all accounts, he was prickly up close; He drank too much, swore around women, was a chain-smoker who blew smoke in peoples faces. But from a distance, he lent a grace and beauty to the landscape of Salinas.
From today's "The Writer's Almanac"
Other than that, they it was a fairy tale house; a structure that defied common sense and space utilization. It had an odd little round tower on the south east corner, with a simple little sitting area of low benching running the perimeter of the inside space--and the very glass in the windows was curved as well!
Stories would pop up of a lovely woman who sat in that little round room at the corner of the building, her dark hair piled up like the ladies of old sepia prints in family albums. She always wore white, and you could see her in the day, and sometimes at night through the curved glass of the double-hung windows. I never saw her, myself. But I had friends who said they did--she was the ghost of Steinbeck's mother, they said. Yes, this house was the place where John Steinbeck was born. The story of the lady in white was scoffed at by adults; But I would look at those windows every day for all the years I went to Roosevelt Elementary.
Grandma loved his writings. She especially was touched by "Of Mice and Men", and I remember seeing her cry as she read "The Grapes of Wrath". She once said that the title "The Winter of our Discontent" was taken from the bible; I corrected her and said it was Shakespeare. She laughed and said I was right, but wasn't it a wonderful line anyway? She would speak to the locals about him--and discovered he was persona non-grata. He was a drunk, and horror of horrors, he had the audacity to write about real people in Salinas. "Did he write about you?" she would ask? "No, but he shouldn't have written about anyone here!" was the ubiquitous reply.
She was puzzled by this reaction. "Don't they realize they had a real genius? A prophet is never honored in his own city." I was able to tell her that was from the bible.
Salinas grew up out of the fertile soil of the Salinas Valley, along the --you guessed it, the Salinas River. There is a book called "The Upside Down River", written during the depression to chronicle the history of the town. The Salinas River flows mostly underground, only rising to the surface where the aquifer is too saturated for it to remain below. Hence the name.
Oddly, one of the town's founders was a distant ancestral relative of Grandma's. And mine, I suppose.
Salinas was old enough to have massive pepper trees; Huge, graceful things, with a sharp, pungent smell that made my nose itch. They are stunning trees, really. Their trunks are thick, with large gnarly lumps on them. Yet the shape of them is graceful, with gentle canopies and pleasant shade beneath.
Pepper trees do drop odd little racemes of seeds, which can irritate sensitive mouths. These hard berries are covered with a dry, hot pink papery covering, and the sound of them crunching beneath my feet is something I can remember, and if I close my eyes and think of it for a second, I can smell that itchy fragrance of the trees.
I always think of those trees when I think of Steinbeck. By all accounts, he was prickly up close; He drank too much, swore around women, was a chain-smoker who blew smoke in peoples faces. But from a distance, he lent a grace and beauty to the landscape of Salinas.
From today's "The Writer's Almanac"
It was on this day in 1937 that John Steinbeck published his novel Of Mice and Men, the story of two migrant farm workers, George Milton and his simple-minded friend Lennie Small, who dream of owning their own place and living off the fat of the land. In the novel, George Milton says, "We'd have a little house an' a room to ourself. Little fat iron stove, an in the winter we'd keep a fire goin' in it. ... An when we put in a crop, why, we'd be there to take the crop up. We'd know what come of our planting. ... It'd be our own, an' nobody could can us."
He wanted his novel to reach the very workers he was writing about, but he knew that many poor farm workers were illiterate. He had seen theater troupes performing for farm labor camps, and he got the idea that he could write a novel that was made up almost entirely of dialogue, so that it could also be produced as a play.
Steinbeck had almost finished his first draft of the novel when his dog tore the manuscript to shreds. He wrote to his editor, "Two months work to do over again. … I was pretty mad, but the poor little fellow may have been acting critically." He eventually rewrote the novel and it was published on this day in 1937. The play was produced soon after, and both the novel and the play were huge successes. Of Mice and Men has remained one of Steinbeck's most popular novels, and it's been made into a movie three times, in 1939, 1981, and 1992.