On Our Street

At the risk of being dubbed egotistically mendacious, I set down the fact that Pollyanna would have thrived on our street. The typical pessimist (somehow or other I have n’t kept step with the pessimists well enough to know who he may be) would have shriveled up and died.

For on our street (and I set it apart in a paragraph to mark its importance) every woman is in love with her husband and her home, and every man is in love with his wife and his children.

And we are all poor. That is, in a material sense we are poor. We would n’t trade places with Rockefeller, though, any of us. He has a bad stomach, you know. And we can eat our own fresh cabbage out of our own backyard gardens, and sleep the night through with never a hoof-beat of the nocturnal mare.

Every man and every woman on our street could participate with full privileges in the home-coming celebrations of several and sundry colleges scattered here and there over the globe. Mr. Witwer, with his Rhodes scholarship, makes this last statement possible. Therefore, the traditional spots may be knocked forever from the theory that college women make poor wives and poorer mothers. They do not. We can prove it on our street.

The age-limit on our street seems to be about thirty-five. The salary-limit, so far, has placed itself at three thousand; vide Mr. Witwer. The average is twenty-four hundred. But Mr. Witwer’s little girl is crippled, and the difference must be devoted to medical attention for her. Last week the doctor told us that in another year she may walk. The news made us all as happy as if it had been our own Dorothy or our own Mary. There are a number of little Marys on our street and a corresponding number of little Johns. We have no Gwendolyns or Percys.

On Saturday afternoons our young assistant professors and engineers work on our lawns and our gardens. They all wear khaki when they do it, and haul out their old puttees or boots. For every man on our street spent his allotted time in Uncle Sam’s service, and each had a shoulder decoration. Some of the decorations extended to the left pocket-flap before they returned home. We are as proud of these as if the right were ours, individually, to stow them away in our cedar chests. And we are as proud of Mr. Towner in his olivegreen-and-red triangle as we are sympathetic of his fading sight that debarred him from more active service.

We share three or four ‘ by-the-day ’ women, to help us over the hard places, and, aside from a schoolgirl or two to help with the babies once in a while afternoons, we are servantless. Our husbands operate their own boot-black kits and pressing-boards. They boast about the shine on their boots and the lack of shine on their clothing.

We save our pleasure pennies for the movies, Galli-Curci, football, and Sir Oliver Lodge. We browse about the bookstalls for Einstein and Lansing, Kipling, de Maupassant, ‘Opal,’and Peter B. Kyne. We all flivvered down to watch the bulletin-board report of the July bout, and came back with the thought predominant that peace with Germany had been consummated.

Are we some of the ‘wild young people’ John F. Carter, Jr., wrote about last September? Should n’t wonder if we were. Our men were at Armageddon. One or two of our women were there. Most of us have an easy time convincing our parents, when they park their Packard and Peerless plutocracy out in front of our houses and come in to romp with the children, that ‘this is the life.’ Our particular form of ‘wildness’ seems to be a reversion to lace-paper valentine days, to old-fashioned gardens, old-fashioned religion, and oldfashioned marriage days.

We’re pretty happy on our street.