Skelley's Garage

Skelley's Garage. Near 30th and Upas, in San Diego. The neighborhood with its resonances, because my mother once lived on Upas Street--that would have been in the late 1920's. I can remember the way she would say the name, enjoying the up-and-down of its sound. It was a difficult time in her life--just at the beginning of the Depression, with a young daughter to raise on her own, and a secretarial job at nearby Florence Elementary school. But the principal there, Miss Nye, was a woman my mother revered, and when she'd talk about those years, Miss Nye would be mentioned first.

Miss Nye was severe, and a strict teetotaler. I remember her paying us a visit once, years later--I must have been about 6 or 7, when we lived in Kensington, a neighborhood nearby. My parents served her a glass and saucer of my father's cherry liquor (also made in the depression years)--grain alcohol was the base, and the steeped cherries were lethal. Miss Nye tasted one of them, in the saucer provided, enjoyed it (no idea about the liquor) and proceeded to eat the rest. Ah, the best of intentions. She became quite typsy. My parents, I think,  smiled...
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But this is recent. We were walking along Upas, looking to meet a group of friends at a restaurant nearby, when we came upon this place--and I was absolutely struck by the facade, that duck-bill overhang canopy roof with name and telephone number wrapping around, hand-painted--Skelley's Garage 281-1901--every bit of it makeshift and piecemeal, patched together out of sheet-metal sometime long ago, balanced on two poles, more a signboard than a shelter, but somewhere a nod to Raymond Loewy and the streamlined look of American Art Deco--industrial design, rather--the locomotive--but here that image had been foisted on an otherwise nondescript gasoline station in an obscure part of town.

Made me realize just how emblematic I found this--like some source of my own true  being. Not even what painter Israel Hershberg had railed against in Jerusalem--that quality of tachlif--substitution (which he perceived in almost all contemporary Israeli art), but here, in my own hometown, an impossible imitation, a whiff, at the most, a hint at the possibility of a history, undiscovered, unrealized--almost not even an allusion...

It's why I'd left, in 1960. I knew there had to be more in the universe than these sandy back lots and blank sunsets. But now, on return, I saw it--Skelley's also felt like home...

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