Mr Matthews' Cul de Sac

He didn't remember me. We passed each other in the shampoo and hair color isle, neither one of us shopping for anything stocked there,  when recognizing instantly  his face older by decades since I last had seen it,  his posture slightly stooped now, I said, "Hello, Mr Matthews!". He stopped, I stopped, gazed at me for ten seconds before saying, "You must be one of my students."  I was, I had been. I took two classes from him, drawing and the next semester after that painting, and I would have taken more if he had taught them, and if my college major had been, as it should have been in art, and I wasn't just fulfilling some liberal arts requirement.  Decades later we know for certain what we should have done instead.

Mr Matthews was an art teacher, but he was primarily a full time artist with regular showings at galleries, and a cartoonist whose work was printed in the New Yorker, Playboy and other magazines.  He was now long retired, but still active in art, still submitting and receiving rejections from the New Yorker, he informed me laughingly. He was surprised at how close to his age I seemed to be now, and I had to explain that I wasn't 18 in his class like all his other students. "We could both use these products now", I said, pointing to the shelf filled with hair dyes, "What's your pleasure?"  "I have to remember this", he replied chuckling, and "Oh yes, now I recall, you are the one who gave me a lot of cartoon ideas".  I had never heard that before, and I doubt it was 'a lot', but it must have been a few, when we exchanged jokes, puns and bon mots, bending cliches and twisting common sayings, so much so during those times in class, that I wonder how I ever  managed to do any drawing or painting.

Mr Matthews invited me to his house for coffee, about two blocks away up the street,  and we drove there in my car, after making our purchases.  "I walked here," he told me, "my housekeeper says I need more exercise."   We stepped inside, Mr Matthews made us two espressos from his Italian machine,  sprinkled some brandy into them, we sat down at the window of his living room overlooking the street below us going straight down in the Western direction  from his house all the way across the residential section of the city toward the railroad tracks and the freeway running North - South  along the Western edge of the city.  He pulled a notepad and wrote down what he promised himself to write down while we were conversing inside the drugstore.  He would continue to jot down ideas while we talked.

Now, the street and the house. His house was at the end of the street where my house stands about a mile and a quarter away Westward down the gentle hill.   I know the approximate distance, because years ago I measured it using the odometer of my car when the odometers were still analog, those little turning wheels, like some gears, and included tenths of a mile, so that you knew when to start and stop measuring.  Nowadays, with computer technology, the odometers could probably measure distance down to a hundredth of a mile, and yet the ones that I have seen measure it only by a full mile, making such distance calculations practically impossible.

And so, the distance from my house to the edge of the shopping center was exactly one mile, from there to Mr Matthews house at the end of this street, I would estimate is almost a quarter mile.   Going the other way, from my house downward to the end of my street is another quarter mile.  And so the street is about a mile and a half long. It has two 15 degrees turns, one halfway down in the southern direction, and an eight of a mile before it ends in the northern direction.  At its West end, that is below my house, it merges into the parallel street to the North of it, which after another eighth of a mile merges into the parallel street that ran to the South of my street, which then goes for another half mile to end at the road running alongside the freeway.   This is an unusual funnel topography for East West streets in this city, no other streets merge this way, although, interestingly enough,  some North South streets do merge, or split up, and all of them just beyond the borders of this town.

In a modern metropolis of course, one city turns into another invisibly, before you notice it, and I for example, living as I am not far from the Northern border of the city don't know where it ends exactly and where the next city starts.  And there have been houses build on parcels that cross city borders.  Only the tax collector knows, and maybe not even he, since he collects real estate taxes for the entire county.

But let's get back to Mr Matthews' house.  My street ends as I said at his house, though it doesn't really dead end, because you can turn left or right from it on the cross street which goes on at least a mile in each direction. And so, Mr Matthews's house is you could say the center top point of a 'T' shape of two streets that meet in front of it. Here is where the story gets interesting.   It wasn't always this way, Mr Matthews told me.   My street crossed the present cross street, which wasn't yet developed or even paved, and continued for almost another 35 yards where a steeper hill started. A house stood on each side of it, and another house at the end facing the street down from a cul de sac.   That house still stands and is occupied by Mr Matthews' tenants.  He owns it.

The man who built that house later bought the two other houses on the dead end of the street, demolished them, tore down the street between them and built the present big house where Mr Matthews and I were sitting.  And after that he wanted to keep the street address of this house, and his old house behind it with the old street name.  But the house he built became part of a new street, that forms the roof of the 'T', and the city resisted.  The man fought the city hall, Mr Matthews thinks he didn't like the name of the new street, the last name of a patriot general, and he lost the battle.   There is still a plaque above the front door, which Mr Matthews showed me,  with the name of my street on it and a house number that doesn't exist in city or county records, and the post office won't recognize. A fantasy number.  The builder eventually sold the property to Mr Matthews' parents.