# Travels in Philadelphia/Meditations on Oysters

MEDITATIONS ON OYSTERS
Sansom street, below Ninth, runs a modest course through the middle of the afternoon, scooped between high and rather grimy walls so that a coolness and a shadow are upon it. It is a homely little channel, frequented by laundry wagons taking away great piles of soiled linen from the rear of the Continental Hotel, and little barefoot urchins pushing carts full of kindling wood picked up from the litter of splintered packing cases. On one side of the street is a big power-house where the drone and murmur of vast dynamos croon a soft undertone to the distant clang and zooming of the trolleys. Beyond that is the stage door of a burlesque theatre, and a faint sweetness of grease-paint drifts to the nose down a dark, mysterious passageway.
We walked down this little street, noticing the For Rent sign on a saloon at the corner and the pyramided boxes of green and yellow apples on a fruit stand, and it seemed to us that there was an unmistakable breath of autumn in the air. Out beyond, where the street widens and floods itself again with sun, there were heat and shimmer and the glittering plate-glass windows of jewelry dealers, but in the narrower strip of alley we felt a premonitory tang of future frost. At the end of August the sunlight gets yellower, more oblique; it loses the pale and deadly glare of earlier days. ​It is shallower, more colorful, but weaker of impact. Shall we say it has lost its punch?
And then we saw a little oyster café, well known to many lovers of good cheer, that has been furbishing itself for the jolly days to come. No one knows yet whether the U-boats have frightened the oysters, whether the fat bivalves will be leaner and scarcer than in the good old days; no one knows whether there will even be enough of them to last out until next Easter; but in the meantime we all live in hope. And one thing is certain—the oyster season begins on Monday. The little café has repainted its white front so that it shines hospitably; and the sill and the cellar trapdoor where the barrels go in, and the shutters and the awning poles in front, are all a sticky, glistening green. The white marble step, hollowed by thousands of eager feet in a million lunch-time forays, has been scrubbed and sandsoaped. And next Monday morning, bright and early, out goes the traditional red and green sign of the R.
The "poor patient oyster," as Keats calls him (or her, for there are lady oysters, too, did you know?), is not only a sessile bivalve mollusk, but a traditional symbol of autumn and winter cheer. Even if Mr. Hoover counts out the little round crackers in twos and threes, we hope there will be enough of the thoughtful and innocent shellfish to go around. When the cold winds begin to harp and whinny at street corners and wives go seeking among camphor balls for our last year's ​overcoats, you will be glad to resume your acquaintance with a bowl of steaming bivalves, swimming in milk, with little clots of yellow butter twirling on the surface of the broth. An oyster stew, a glass of light beer and a corncob pipe will keep your blue eyes blue to any weather, as a young poet of our acquaintance puts it.