“The smell of gasoline made the sight of the palm trees seem sad.”
Pulled that from John Fante’s Ask the Dust.
Here’s the whole paragraph:
And so I was down on Fifth and Olive, where the big street cars chewed your ears with their noise, and the smell of gasoline made the sight of the palm trees seem sad, and the black pavement still wet from the fog of the night before.
Palm trees are everywhere in the book (everywhere in the first 60 pages, at least), and the narrator is worried about their happiness in a city increasingly dominated by cars.
It was a fair worry, in my opinion. But it’s worth noting that many of those same LA palms are hanging in there today, convinced, it seems, that trees still have some say in this city.
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