One morning last week, my in-house political analyst and I walked to OD’s Kitchen for breakfast. (I like their Kitchen Sink; he is partial to the Rosebud.)
We walked along Hanna Street I liked the roundabout in front of the new police station, for selfish reasons: it should impede traffic on Hanna even after the street is reopened to motorists. Hanna will stay relatively quiet.
My in-house traffic analyst quibbles that if it had been placed 20 feet north, it would have been a functional roundabout for the parking lots instead of a merely decorative one.
To our east sprawled the single-story City Hall, to the west loomed the towering bulk of the brand new police station, making an interesting, if ominous, architectural allegory on the relative might of the civil and police powers.
We turned east on Sixth, but lingered at Eigleberry to enjoy an amazing sight.
Ever since construction began on the Monterey streetscape, a temporary stop sign has made the Sixth and Eigleberry intersection a four-way stop. Combined with the stop at Church, the stop at Hanna, and the temporary four-way red blinking light at Monterey, we had been suffering four stops in five blocks on the major downtown east-west traffic thoroughfare.
The Monterey Street light was restored to its proper functioning a few months ago, to the great satisfaction of downtown residents. Now, at Eigleberry, we saw that the temporary stop sign had vanished. Moreover, the Eigleberry traffic was warned by signs that “CROSS TRAFFIC DOES NOT STOP,” which, given the prevalence of California rolling stops in our fair city, is a brilliant expedient.
While admiring the warning signs and the traffic, we noticed that two-thirds of the cars driving through on Sixth Street braked to a stop at the non-existent sign. Old habits die hard.
The traffic reminded us of a cat we once had. This cat had shown up in our driveway as a starveling half-grown kitten. Naturally, the kids asked to adopt her.
“No more cats,” I said.
“But, Mom, the poor kitty. There’s something wrong with her eyes.”
Her eyes were crusted shut with dried mucus. So against my better judgment, the kids brought her inside. She purred. They fed her. She purred louder. We combed her for fleas. She purred even louder. She even purred while I washed her eyes clean with a wet washcloth. One eye was missing; the other was a milky white.
I allowed her to stay one night. The next morning we found her curled up in a basket full of Anne’s stuffed animals, purring. We named her Fanny Crosby, after the blind hymn writer, more because she purred hymns of praise all day than because of her disability.
Fanny proved to be a very competent cat. She soon had the house and backyard memorized, and would even climb the trees and into the treehouse and onto our neighbor’s roof.
About this time, my in-house electrician decided to re-wire the garage. This necessitated digging a trench across the backyard for the electrical conduit. He paid our sons, who were too young to know better, $2 an hour to dig the trench.
The next morning, Fanny Crosby ran out the back door and across the yard toward her favorite tree. She did not get far. Hissing and spitting, she clawed her way out of the trench.
Then, slowly, cautiously, she prowled along the edge of the trench, mapping it out. Crouching at intervals, she reached across with one tawny forepaw, until she located a spot where she could touch the other side. Gingerly, she hopped across.
Within a few days, she was running merrily out the back door, straight for her tree, and without a pause, leaping the trench, having calculated its position to a nicety.
A week later, the rewiring was complete. The boys filled in the trench. But Fanny, oblivious, kept leaping the non-existent trench for months afterwards, to the amusement and admiration of her adopted family … just as the Sixth Street drivers kept stopping at the non-existent sign.
The Sixth Street traffic seemed just as amusing, until I found myself braking for the non-existent sign later that evening. Old habits die hard … very hard.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day.
