DRIFTING STILL

Just so you know, I’m keeping on walking – in accordance with government guidelines, naturally.  There are lots of cats and birds just walking in the road – because there’s so little traffic.  There is also an increase in road kill – not cats, but pigeons, plus the occasional rabbit and hedgehog.

But how about this for a surprise – growing up in the road between the tarmac and the kerb – garlic!!  Or so I thought.  Greener people than me have suggested it's probably chives, and they're surely right.  But it does smell very garlicy.

So I don't know if it’s some wild variety or an escapee from somebody’s garden.  It smells great, and in general I believe in foraging but somehow gutter garlic or even gutter chives seems a bit unappealing.  Call me overdelicate.
                                                            *
And I talked to my neighbor a couple of days later - she tells me they're all escapees from her front garden - and she doesn't like the taste of chives!!

THE DUKES OF AMBOY

Possibly you’ve never been to Amboy, in the Mojave desert.  If you’re heading to 29 Palms from Primm or Needles then you’re likely to pass through it.  If not, not.  It’s one of those desert towns in private hands that comes up for sale once in a while.  I’m always tempted.

But even if you haven’t been there there’s a chance you may have seen it in the movies (not least the Rutger Hauer version of The Hitcher) or in photographs, not least this one by William Egglestone. 

It’s the sign for Roy’s Motel and Café that makes you stop, get out of the car and walk around.  I’ve never known the motel to be in business but some of the cabin doors have often been open and this time was a kind of art installation in some of the cabins, going by the name of the Matza Archives:

There’s also a school in Amboy, again long out of business, a kind of garage where I have seen evidence of people working on cars, and there’s a post office, and a public toilet which are thriving.

 

I can never tell if they’re really selling gas or not in Amboy, but the café/gift shop is reliably open and I always feel obliged to buy something even if it’s only a soda.  This time however I had a treat in store.  This Felix the Cat walking sticker:

The guy behind the counter said they’d been selling them for a while but they’d been slow movers until they’d had the bright idea of printing Amboy California on the bottom.  Works for me either way.

If you’re serious and have 4 hours to spare you can go out of town and clamber up the Amboy Crater, which I have been known to do, and the proof of which is here:

WALKING WHISTLING

I like this.  It’s from Sweet William, by Richmal Crompton, who is one of the very few, possibly the only, author I read in my childhood that I can still read today.  It’s from a chapter titled “Pensions for Boys":
     “William walked down the road, whistling his loud untuneful whistle and kicking a suitably-sized stone from side to side.  He wasn’t going anywhere in particular, so it didn’t matter when he got there.  Even if he had been going anywhere in particular it wouldn’t have made any difference.  William considered it waste of time to walk straight along a road.  If there weren’t stones to kick, there were ditches and hedges to investigate, trees to climb …”

It’s the whistling that gets me.  Whistling while walking is supposedly a sign of innocence, but it always comes over as a sign of guilt.  Now I’m not sure if small boys do much whistling anymore, although I know that Bart Simpson does: 

I can’t believe that Matt Groening ever read the Just William books but Bart and William are clearly brothers under the skin.

And they’re both some kin of Felix the Cat, the walking, whistling feline.  I like to think I’m some kin too.

WALKING PRESIDENTIALLY

On Christmas Day afternoon the Loved One and I went for a walk – nothing major – just a couple of miles or so, 45 minutes up and down and around the hills of the neighborhood.  We didn’t encounter a single moving car.  For that matter we didn’t meet many moving, or walking, people, though we did eventually cross separate paths with two couples and one family group complete with oldsters, children and dogs.  Every one was amazingly friendly.

This, I suppose, is the way it goes at Christmas.  Even people who never put one foot in front of the other for the rest of the year decide this is the time when they need to get out, with or without family, and show what they’re made of, in the name of good cheer, or possibly to work up an appetite.

It seems that President Obama feels somewhat the same.  The White House website tells us “In keeping with the President's vision to make the Obama Administration as accessible as possible, the White House is inviting the American People to sit back, relax, and follow along on his 2014 Hawaii Vacation.”  And so (whether we’re American people or not) we can sit back, relax and watch him walk.

Above for instance, “Obama and family go hiking in Hawaiian island of Oahu.” This looks like a very, very extended family.  There seem to be dozens of them (including one or two body guards I assume), and also it seems there were dozens of photographers too.  This is actually a screen cap, and on the video you can hear shutters clicking off screen like a thousand noisy insects.

No doubt there were fewer photographers (possibly just one) and far, far fewer family members, on the President’s first morning in Hawaii, when he was able to pose for this picture “President Obama enjoyed a relaxing sunrise walk on 
Kailua Beach” the White House site tells us.  Is he really going to walk and swim and read?  A busy sunrise, for sure.

I don’t know what Obama got for Christmas, perhaps it tells us somewhere on the website, but I’ll bet he didn’t get one of these, which I did:

It’s an antique plate with an image of Felix the Cat – admittedly it looks like the caption says “Felix the Gat” but I can live with that; a creature who walks alone and doesn't seem all that cheerful about it.

FELICITOUS WALKING

When I first moved to LA I always said I’d go for a walk and look at the famous Felix the Cat sign over Felix Chevrolet, at the corner of South Figueroa St and Jefferson Boulevard.  It would be a 16 mile round trip, which isn’t totally out of the question, but it’s a long walk just look at an advertising sign, and one way or another I never did it until this weekend.  And I still didn’t walk there, at least not from home.  I happened to be at USC, talking about walking, and since Felix Chevrolet is right there by the university it wasn’t much of a stretch from the campus to the dealership.

I have a special affection for Felix the Cat, partly because when I was a kid and I was out with my mother, if I slowed down or got distracted she’d say, “Be like Felix, keep on walking.” I knew what she meant, but only lately much later did I know who Felix was, and only long after that did I actually see a Felix cartoon.

Felix as a character, has been around since 1919 when he appeared (though not under that name) in an animated short titled Feline Follies.  It was produced by Pat Sullivan, directed by Otto Messmer.  The people I know who care about these things, are convinced that Messmer was the true begetter, though Sullivan did claim credit, sometimes saying he was inspired by Rudyard Kipling’s short story “The Cat That Walked By Himself.”  I don’t honestly buy this, though this illustration by Kipling himself is pretty wonderful.

My mother, I think, was referring to the song 1923 song "Felix Kept On Walking," music by Hubert W. David and lyric by Ed E. Bryant.  There was a cartoon titled Felix the Cat Kept on Walking which came out in 1925, so the song must in some way have inspired the movie, but perhaps only the title.  In the cartoon he walks to England, where he is chased by immigration officers, then kicked around, and eventually out of the country, by soccer players. 

As the image on the sheet music suggests, Felix wasn’t a very happy cat in this incarnation.  He softened and became more affable (some might say more Mickey Mouse-ish) as the years went by.  He didn’t only appear on screen and in song, but om all kinds of advertising memorabilia including this piece which sold at auction for about 1200 dollars recently.  I've never understood why the feet had to be so square and lump.

He still looks grumpy there, and not at all the way he does on the sign above Felix Chevrolet.  A man with the scarcely improvable name of Winslow Felix, opened Felix Chevrolet in 1921 at (according to some authorities) 12th Street and Grand Avenue in LA (others place it at 11th and Olive, which is certainly close by).  Felix was a friend of cartoonist Pat Sullivan, who in exchange for a car, told him to go ahead and use Felix the Cat in his advertising.

 In 1958 the dealership changed hands, moved to its current location at 3330, S. Figueroa Street, and the sign was installed.  In 2012 the sign was spruced up, and that included restoring the neon which hadn’t been working properly for some time.

Of course Felix is not actually walking on the big sign, he’s just standing there, but at least I was walking when I saw him, even if not very far.