Final Post: Growing Up In South St. Louis, Circa 2010

Sophia, Maeve, and Leo live in South St. Louis. They were born here and they will probably spend their entire childhoods here.

They will have a backyard that is barely 30 feet wide. Room enough for a galvanized pool, a swingset, a hammock, a deck, and a garden. They will have access to an alley through the back gate, and to the front yard and the street through the gangway. Mostly, they will play on the sidewalks in the front, riding bikes and scooters up and down the block all summer long. In the shade of street trees, they will sit on stoops and eat homemade popsicles that drip down their chins.

Their house was built in 1905 of red brick. It is a four-square construction and their bedrooms are tucked into the attic.

They will grow up in a city with one of the best public library systems in the country; the free museums and zoos are far better than a city of this size deserves. They will take public transportation and walk to south Grand to get ice cream. Their school is in a church basement ten blocks north of their house, sticking to its promise of being a neighborhood school. Full of city kids and city parents and everyone is just like them, only more so.

They might not have a yard worth mentioning, but Tower Grove Park is across Grand. And the Missouri Botanical Garden is just a mile or so away.

I thought for a long time I would raise my children in a rural location, homeschooling, going against the grain. But the longer I sit on the stoop here, the more deeply connected I become to my neighbors, the more I realize I'm a city girl. My kids are city kids. And I'm not afraid of that.

When we were looking for a house, Mary, my co-worker who lived on Hartford, whose sister Kate is Maeve's godmother now, whose niece Rachel made me the teacher I am today, said to me, "come join us in South City."

We did. And now those three kids of mine sit in my living room on a wood floor that is 105 years old, playing dominoes and watching a DVD and singing songs about photosynthesis. I feel finally like they, and I, are living an authentic life. We live here. We are here. This is who we are. Geography is destiny. Choose wisely.

30. Block Party 2008

We didn't have a block party last year. The most likely planners, my neighbors two doors down, had just gotten home from vacation and were tired. National Night Out is often so hot and humid and St. Louis. So we skipped it.

We won't skip it this year.

I hear that National Night Out came from the practice of sleeping outdoors in parks in hot summer nights. I can't even imagine doing that these days. And with all of us on the block in air conditioned brick cubes, there's no reason to.

But there are many reasons for block parties.

29. Bellerive Park to the River Facing South

And that distance out there where the earth meets the sky.

28. The Lindell Hotel

In Tower Grove, there are stones set up to look like ruins. They are. But they aren't from there. They're from the Lindell Hotel, which burned or was destroyed somehow, and remains of the hotel were trucked to Tower Grove and set up along a pool. With a fountain. And ducks.



It's strange how odd things become everyday when they become home. When we came here to take our wedding photos, it was bizarre: why was this in a park? What the heck is this??

But now we bike past them all the time. And tour buses filled with wedding parties wait for their turn to take photos.

27. Behind the Free Seats

One summer I came up to St. Louis with my brother. I think I must have been about to start my junior year of high school. We stayed at my grandmother's house in North County, and at some point in the stay, my Aunt Chris came by and picked us up.

My cousin Gina was in town, too, and she tagged along. We were a year apart in age but, I think, two years apart in school. We spent the day with Chris, who was younger than our fathers, an only child in the middle of a family of 8 kids. We wound up in Forest Park and found our way to this hall behind the free seats at the Muny:The show wasn't something Chris recognized, and we certainly didn't, but she said she'd bring us back that night. Sit in the free seats, separated from the paying customers by a chain link fence. We went back to my grandmother's house long enough to let her know what our plan was, and to pack a dinner. Days before cell phones.

The musical was "No No Nanette" which impressed me not at all. I don't remember a single thing about it. But it was a beautiful summer night, we were eating salami sandwiches and shoestring potatoes and cut up strawberries, and my parents were 900 miles away. So that in itself was enough.

I don't go to the Muny often, alas, because I have these kids and we get so busy. I've been to the Fox 4 times in the past year but haven't been to the Muny since Mike's grandparents died (they always came up a time or two each summer to see the show). And honestly, I probably won't go this year, either.

Because for some reason, sitting down closer to the front on a hot humid night, sticky and still, just isn't as fun for me compared to this mediocre musical from the free seats in a summer out of time.

26. House Tour B&B

I'm a house captain again this year for the Grand South Grand House Tour. Punishment for a job well done last time. My house is on of those acts of love, those houses people buy because of the staircase--never mind the obnoxious paint job and the teal carpeting. The owners are hoping to run it as a B&B, and I wish them success. I've stayed in a number of B&Bs--in central Missouri, in Eastern Nevada, Carmel-by-the-Sea, Ste. Genevieve--and what always strikes is what a collection of places fall under that title. If you think of the term "4 star hotel" you and I probably have similar concepts in mind--high rise in an urban setting, huge rooms, high thread count sheets, room service, valet parking. "Budget roadside motel" gives rise to other stereotypes--paper thin towels, 18 locks on the door, the wafting odor of curry, an outdoor pool you wouldn't wash your dog in. But B&B?

The first B&B Mike and I stayed in was a converted 1940s motel in Carmel. The center courtyard, the family-run atmosphere, the meticulous detail. The next was in Hermann, MO (a German settlement) and it was...German. Gruff. Looking down noses on the goofy young couple come to drink wine. And frilly. Way too frilly. Ste. Gen wasn't frilly but awkward--the room was awesome, the food even more so, but breakfast was served "European style" which in their translation meant I sat at a table with an older couple and the hostess (other folks were at other tables) since Mike had already left for the business thing we'd come down for. If you haven't met me, well, I've become better about talking to people as time goes on. But back then? Whoa. Nevada was another converted motel, this one from the copper rush days (I think). It was run down and just my style (which I often refer to as wabi sabi but is in reality "lazy"). Good coffee in the morning.

And our favorite, of course, is Rock Eddy Bluff on the Gasconade. We've only stayed in the proper B&B part of it once--the rest of the time we fend for ourselves in one of their other houses (like renting a cabin for the weekend). This place--the owners have such an eye for detail and a consistency of thought about what should be on the table, on the walls, in the rooms, even on the bookshelves (the past three times I've been there, I've read a novel--I mean, I started it the first time, continued the second, and finished it this past weekend). You never turn around and see something and wonder WHY? Why is that here?

The house tour B&B is different yet again. It is an amazing house--the staircase alone is worth the price of admission. There are collections of plates and glassware and Asian textiles throughout the house. I covet the back sunporch. But it has had a rough life and there are still signs of it--the third story staircase is rickety, and the house backs up to what was once a terrible block (but has improved, thus improving the whole neighborhood). The house was once a B&B, and then stood empty. It's been through several owners, and that's rarely a good thing. The owners have done quite a bit to bring it back, though, and I think it will be a success story in the end. I think it would be a nice alternative to a downtown hotel. You'd see a neighborhood that otherwise you might never even notice as a traveler to St. Louis. Coming to town for a wedding or event, it would be nice to come back to in the evening. And I hope it works for them. See you this weekend!

25. Jeffersonian Door

I have a Jeffersonian window. I don't know how it got its name. Perhaps Thomas Jefferson liked them. Maybe they were at Monticello. I don't know. A quick google search is futile. The only sites I can find are other St. Louis architecture blogs. Perhaps it's a colloquialism.

What is a Jeffersonian window? When closed, it looks like any other window in the room. It has a top pane and bottom, a lock in the center where they meet, and a handle that looks as if it would raise the lower pane up. Just like any double-hung window. But when you pull the handle up, you realize the window raises from the floor. The paneling below the window isn't attached the wall, but in the track with the lower pane of glass.

So you raise this up into the ceiling--the bottom of the window goes up at least to the level of the lock where the two window panes meet. It may be (mine is old, obviously, and I don't push and pry) that at that point both parts can continue up further into the wall, but my upper pane doesn't budge. So you have to duck a bit to walk through the doorway it makes, but you can walk through.

Mine opens onto a sleeping porch off my bedroom. We don't use it often because the cats can jump from the porch to the neighbor's kitchen window (we live next to a 2-family flat with an apartment on the second floor). Since I've played that game once with Hickory already, I'm not about to let them sun on the porch until I get it screened in. Which I will do--it's just a matter of priorities.

But that door is the reason we will never do a two-story addition to the back of our house. We might one day expand the kitchen and dining room. We might one day then expand the sleeping porch onto the addition's roof and make a deck. But I won't part with the door. My house has few intricacies of this sort. It is the Plain Jane on a block of Fancy Nancies. I won't take her Jeffersonian window away.

24. Authentic Rehab

This past week at coffee, Ann mentioned that she and her husband were talking that morning about authenticity. What makes something authentic? They were talking about vacation spots and natural wonders and so forth--her husband is an architect whose focus is on such destinations. So we talked a bit about it for a moment, giving examples of what is and is not authentic. In the end, we couldn't define authentic, "but I know it when I see it."

"This coffee house," she pointed around us. "This is authentic."

As opposed to, say, a Starbucks, she went on, which is prefabricated. I knew what she meant.

I've been looking at houses with my sister Bevin lately, and some of them are authentic and some are not. Sometime we'll walk into a house and have the strange feeling that something isn't right. I don't mean some sort of sixth sense about the house or its former inhabitants (although I admit sometimes that happens, too). I'm talking about rehab projects.

There seem to be three types of rehabbers in south St. Louis (and perhaps nationwide or worldwide in cities of every age and type). First, those who strip the house of all its authenticity--in St. Louis, that means the woodwork, the plaster walls, mantels, doors, plumbing fixtures, kitchen cabinets, and so forth--and replace it with something out of a display home in the county. Baseboards shrink from 10 inches to 2. The bathrooms lose the clawfoot tub and gain a walk in shower. The floors are carpeted in berber or worse. Peel and stick vinyl in the kitchen with plain light wood cabinetry. Sometimes they go over the top with granite counters and gorgeous stone floors, but it still feels wrong. Bevin and I walk in, sometimes ooh and ah over bits of it (like the California closets, I mean, I could go with some inauthentic details in my closets), but always walk out with a shrug. Not the same thing at all.

Then there are the remuddlers. We've seen some doozies. Indoor-outdoor carpeting in the kitchen. Or bathroom. Refrigerators in the pantry. Faux fireplaces with 1970s-era looking faux-brick surrounds. Plastic tile on the walls. Closets of all sorts built in the wrong places. Windows you can see from outside but not from the inside--they've been covered up with drywall. Beams half-supported on jacks. Cheap vinyl windows. Gas lines that cut through ductwork. Two family conversions to single family homes that are simply a hole knocked in the wall--the old kitchen upstairs is a bedroom. With a kitchen sink and cabinets above a bed. Toilets in glass-brick walled bathrooms in the basement. I could go on. They are maybe authentic, in that they are authentic crap, but they are still crap.

Sometimes, though, we find a house that has been lovingly restored to its original magnificence (or better in some cases). Built in cabinetry around an arts and crafts mantel. Original wood floors in the kitchen. Clawfoot tubs with re-finished feet. Woodwork in dark colors, ceiling beams in the dining room, windows that are wood at least on the inside.

This last group, of course, is always outside Bevin's price range.

You pay for what you get.

Luckily, we have seen some relatively untouched places, maybe with a few mistakes, but not too much to undo or wish wasn't gone. The kitchen might be a Home Depot special, but the woodwork in the living room is intact. The floors are wide pine, like mine, in bad shape but with that authentic patina of a hundred years of feet walking across them. These are my goal when I look at houses with her. Find one with a new electric service, copper pipes, and an HVAC system younger than the Reagan administration. And then pounce on the dang thing before somebody ruins it.

That's how I feel about my house. Every time I lift off one more layer of Mary Chapman, I feel the house breathe a sigh of relief. Better now.

23a. Sylvan Springs Photos

23. Sylvan Springs Park

Our school picnic every year was a carnival. We had a parade from the parking lot down the road past the national cemetery and into the little county park. Carnival rides, picnics, and exhaustion awaited us. I remember, as a girl scout, being a color guard at the front of the parade in 5th grade. I carried the flag and got to hand it off to Nikki about halfway. We had to practice the handoffs without stopping the parade.

We set up in the main loop, families spreading blankets and grabbing up picnic tables. The Tilt-A-Whirl and Scrambler and all those take apart put together deliver on a truck rides were back a bit further. We had ride bracelets, of course, color coded string attached to our wrists with a metal clasp of the same color. Craig always thought he could counterfeit them and sell them on the side, but he never did.

We rode the rides and had lunch with the families and I don't think anyone ever got a sunburn because of the huge pin oak trees shading the whole place. The first two years, that was the extent of it, but in fifth grade, having changed out of the girl scout uniform and into more standard kid attire, having ridden the rides more times than I could count with Jenny Jennifer Misdy Nikki Christy, I walked away from the carnival with Misdy and over a little hill.

Misdy lived right behind the park, so it wasn't a surprise for her, but it was like discovering a mysterious little world. Over the hill was a bridge, a stone bridge, and beyond that, steps down into a stone courtyard. I stood at the top of them, taking this sharp little breath and staring at the courtyard. A spring ran through it, with tiny stone bridges and little alcoves and a spout in the wall on one end where the spring came out. Misdy knew about this place and it of course became a place of legend and fantasy. It was perfect for play about elves or fairies, and even at 10 I wasn't too old for that sort of thing. We went back to the carnival, but the next time I went over to her house, we spent the whole time in the courtyard.

I moved after fifth grade and didn't look back. Visits to St. Louis involved tourist destinations like the zoo and downtown hotels, not little county parks with mysterious stone courtyards hidden in the hills. I forgot all about it until I came up for a college visit with my high school boyfriend. I drove him down to Sylvan Springs Park and showed it to him, in the dark, on the way back to my grandmother's house after a trip to Ted Drewes (of course). We stood there in the stone courtyard, the spring no longer active, warning signs on the trees to keep us from drinking the poisonous sulfur laden water. Graffiti on the stones. The place in disrepair. But I'll hand it to him. He saw what I saw.

On the way back to the car he said simply, "if you come up to school here, be careful."

I took Mike by the park once, to see that the little courtyard had been partially restored. It was a World War II era biergarten for the troops stationed briefly at Jefferson Barracks (which my old grade school practically sat in--we could watch national guard troops do their thing while we were at recess). It was a place for parties, and a private group had restored it after a different generation of teenagers had used it for their own parties.

We took Sophia when she turned 4--I took pictures of her there in the biergarten. I could see on her face the same sort of wonder I must have displayed the first time I saw it. I guess I need to bring Maeve over this autumn. It's nice to be able to share something like that with them after all these years.

22. Ted Drewes - Grand

"The Chippewa location is the original," Carlos would always insist my freshman year. Then I'd argue with him, because I knew better. Grand was first (in reality, it wasn't, but of the two that still exist, it is older). He'd giggle and I'd get infuriated over nothing and we'd change the subject, again and again.

My dad would come home late after an evening shift, or maybe it's an amalgamated memory of many late nights for different reasons. I had on footie pajamas and a kiddie concrete, strawberry or pineapple, always, sitting in the red van while he had hot fudge and my mother had butterscotch. Hot fudge and butterscotch took on gender, it was so solidly connected in my mind to the flavor of concretes at Ted Drewes.

When I announced I'd be going to Saint Louis University, my anatomy teacher, Mr. Termuhlen, was excited--that's where he went, that's where he met his wife. He had something for me to promise. I needed to find someone from Ohio, somebody in my dorm, which was his wife's dorm, of course, and take them to Ted Drewes. I didn't--I never fell in with any Ohioans, but I took other people there. And people took me there. History repeated itself, right, with my meeting Mike at SLU and getting married...but now I live in St. Louis and there's no romantic notions to pass on to anyone.

The whole last month of pregnancy, all I wanted was a Dutchman sundae (pronounced sun-duh, of course) and it was the one time of year the Chippewa location was closed. Grand is only open in the summer, but Chippewa stays open except for the dead of winter. I had to survive on Dairy Queen, which is like asking for a glass of red wine and being handed Boone's Farm.

Every summer, at some point, I turn to Mike and say "TD?" just like my parents used to. Code so the kids don't know, in case he vetoes. He never vetoes. We plop the kids in the car, in their pajamas and nightgowns, and drive down Grand, just to where it bends at Meramec Street. The bright yellow lights (mosquito prevention? I just don't know), the little blue neon sign, the completely unnecessary sandwich board on the sidewalk. Everybody sitting on the tailgates and trunks. My daughters are partial to mint sundaes, which sounds about as appetizing as a toothpaste shake, but they adore the thick green glue atop a scoop of custard. I usually succumb to the Dutchman, all that sticky goodness of chocolate and caramel and pecan. Mike has the strawberry shortcake.

Tonight, though, it was marshmallow chip. For a change.

21. Vess

Most grocery stores have their off-brand "private brand" soda. Most of them are pretty bad knock offs of the originals. I remember when I worked at Wal*Mart down in Houston, Sam's Cola and its cousins were a quarter a can in the coke machines outside the store--which kept the prices down on the brand name sodas but never tempted me enough to drink them. Actually, I did--I drank the lemon lime whatever it was. But most knock offs just aren't quite right.

I grew up with Vess and I didn't realize it was one of those kinds of brands, sort of a second-tier soda, until I didn't live here and couldn't find it in the stores. As a family, we didn't buy soda when I was little, but anytime we went up to Jack & Joe's house (my dad's aunt Jackie and her husband Joe), I drank Vess strawberry soda. They had a fridge in the basement that was all soda and beer: Vess was the soda, and Pabst was the beer.

Later I grew to love "Just Whistle" which was Vess' orange soda. I didn't realize cream soda was a brownish clear liquid in some parts of the country until I was in college; I thought it was supposed to be an artificial red color like Vess' version (I think this is a northern-southern distinction, actually, as I remember cream soda down in Georgia was red, too).

I don't drink a lot of soda anymore--probably have had two sodas this year. I drink a lot of coffee these days and I try not to ingest too much sugar. But sometimes I think about playing Life or Monopoly down in Jackie and Joe's basement with my cousin and my brother, at that old table that had been my great-grandmother's. I think about that sharp carbonated taste with the ultra-sweet fake strawberry or grape flavor, and I miss it.

20. Water

St. Louis has the best drinking water in the nation. It's true. It's been decided by a panel of water tasting judges. Wouldn't that be an interesting job?

I've known this my whole life.

Our water is clear, for one thing. It comes out of the tap without sediment or color. Ice cubes melt in your glass and there's no extra stuff at the bottom that got pulled out when the water froze. I have lived in places where water was slightly brown or pink or cloudy. Sometimes very cloudy. Sometimes "better make tea before you drink it" kind of sediment problems. Nasty stuff, after living here.

Our water is also taste-free. It does not taste like a chlorinated pool (like my inlaws' water); it doesn't taste metallic, salty, muddy, stale, or swampy. There's no taste at all. Perfect for all purposes, frankly--it makes great coffee and tea, for instance. It's like licking the condensation off a glass of an ice cold beverage of your choice. It tastes like wet.

Our water is cold, too, with pipes far enough below ground to keep from freezing.

We have a lot of it. Enough that I don't have a water meter--I pay a flat rate for water, no matter how much I use. All the old houses in the city are this way. Those two big rivers, you know.

I love St. Louis water. Enough that when I travel, I have a hard time staying hydrated, because every other tap water I've tasted? Gross.

19. Heat and Humidity

It's not the heat...

It isn't. Having lived in southern California, I must honestly admit that the humidity makes everything worse.

Today, and this weekend, we are in for a rare treat: a July three day weekend with high temperatures in the mid-70s and low humidity.

It's like an unseasonably warm early October day. Crisp, even.

This is why I like St. Louis summers. Yes, we had a 10 day stretch in June that made me wonder if I was living in Houston, but now this.

It's been a great time for the air conditioning to go out--the past week has been nice and mild. But we might break some records this weekend, I hear.

Hope so.

18. Sleeping Porch

When I was very young, we lived on South Grand. We lived in a four-family flat building, with four little shotgun style apartments and a center staircase in the front and one in the back. It was a two-bedroom apartment, with a closed in porch off the back bedroom (my bedroom at the time).

When my college roommate moved to Magnolia St., to a two-family flat, they also had a closed in porch off the small back bedroom. And when Mike signed the lease on his first (and later my first) apartment, it was a tiny 1 bedroom, three room shotgun in a four-family building, but it also had that closed in porch.

And I remember thinking, "what, is this some sort of weird 1910 excuse for a three-season room? Some sort of bonus space?" Why on earth would you build a porch off the back bedroom and then close it in with the same windows the rest of the apartment had? It wasn't added on later, and it wasn't closed in later. Windows all around, 8 total--well, 9, really, because the back bedroom it sat against had a window out onto the porch, too.

My great-aunt Sarah explained it to me, finally, the year I lived with her. St. Louis has had miserable summers as long as she can remember (and even though she'd be scandalized to read this in print, she is 92 years old). Those unheated, uninsulated rooms on the backs of the brick houses were sleeping porches. In the heat of the summer, they were the first defense against the sleepless humid nights in the city.

Of course, when the porches themselves got too hot, folks slept in the park. In the park.

I thought about this phenomenon when our air conditioning went out this week. We were in the middle of a strong summer heat wave and the temperature inside of our house started really creeping up. We have a second story porch, but it isn't blocked in or even screened. It has a regular railing and a teensy bit of a slope towards the outside edge. I don't think I'd sleep there at this point.

We made it through the two days without a problem, using a spare room AC unit we usually have up in the attic. But it reminded me that I want that porch in working order sometime soon. It's been three years of talking about it. Right about on schedule, Wissinger-wise.

17. Ash Pit

When I was little my grandfather used to call me Snicklefritz and jokingly threaten that he was going to throw me in the ash pit.

All city houses had alley ash pits. I can see where mine was and where the one across the alley probably was. But they are no more--and the houses with garages don't even have the foundation left.

But in some places they have ash pits still in amazingly good condition, some of them molded from concrete like this one. And they were ash pits--a place to put ashes from the fire place, the coal furnace, and also, of course, for trash.

Nowadays our fireplaces aren't used (or are converted to gas); the furnaces are on the natural gas line; trash goes in the dumpsters. I am fond of dumpsters overall, having lived in places with roll out carts or bags by the front curb. I like having things hide in the alleys.

But I like that our houses are old enough to have the vestiges of this kind.

16. Provel

No, I have not misspelled something.

Provel is cheese. Sort of. It's like American cheese--a pasteurized processed cheese. Not real cheese.

Provel is a St. Louis cheese. I have never yet seen it elsewhere--except perhaps in the satellite cities of Cape Girardeau or Columbia Missouri, that sort of place, where St. Louisans go to college or wind up after they go to college. I never saw it in Georgia or Texas or anywhere else I've spent time in a grocery store.

Provel goes on pizza. For those of you who don't know what "St. Louis style pizza" is, I'll explain. St. Louis style, just as someone who eats it on occasion, not as some sort of expert, is a round cracker crust pizza cut into squares, or sometimes into the traditional pie wedges. I like thin crust, crispy cracker crust with lots of toppings and low on the sauce. I have had wonderful St. Louis style pizza down at Pizza A-Go-Go, where Frank will play the little organ in the corner to entertain diners on a slow night. I've had decent St. Louis style other places...most of these places do not use provel (or give you the choice). Provel on a pizza must be piping hot right out of the oven to be palatable, but some places can make it decently.

Others (especially chain restaurants) do not. They are not ok. The pizzas have a weird sheen to them. Provel cheese was invented to replace mozzarella on pizzas--an easy to melt (and probably cheap) cheese that doesn't string when you bite into it. Provel doesn't do that, after all. It breaks apart easily in a bite. But then it sticks to the back of your teeth and roof of your mouth. You have to coat a pizza in more toppings than its little cracker crust can hold to hide the provel.

Provel makes my friend Mary sick when she eats it; when we go to St. Louis pizza places, we always request mozzarella instead of provel--many places will substitute for you.

For a long time, I thought provel was just a shortened form of the word provelone, which is a fine cheese in its own right. But no--provel is a combination of provelone, cheddar, and swiss all stuck together.

St. Louis has an Italian section in town called The Hill, and some places are fabulous little sandwich shops and grocery stores. Others are restaurants that specialize in Northern Italian cuisine. Plus a hard to swallow sweet red sauce and this weird, weird cheese.

It is best avoided.

15. Free Museums

It's a midwestern thing, I heard on NPR a couple days ago. Free art museums. Wouldn't it be wonderful, the man being interviewed was saying, to go to an art museum for just an hour or so. Go, see something, and leave to contemplate it.

But of course.

St. Louis has a free art museum--a good one. It's not as big as some, but St. Louis isn't as big as some. We have all the standards--a Water Lilies, medieval art, more Max Beckmann than we deserve, ancient stuff from China and Meso-America. Art museum stuff. And I can walk in with a baby in a stroller, take my 7 year old to look at the mummy in the basement, and then walk out without feeling like I have to get my money's worth. I already have.

The parking is free, too--as it is that the free History Museum in the same park. The zoo is free, although you either pay to park or hunt down a spot on the street. We can (and do) go to the zoo and only see a third of it. Then we go have lunch and aren't so totally exhausted that everyone breaks down and cries on the way home. The Science Center is free, although we don't go there as often. Probably only two or three times since Sophia came along. Mike used to work there; once you know the inner workings of a thing (law, sausage, the Science Center) it isn't as enjoyable.

I love free cultural institutions. It makes me not begrudge the fee for the zoo train. Or getting something for my toddler to eat while we're there. It means that we go to these places, instead of just talking about going to these places.

But the other thing it does, the negative thing it does, is it makes my teeth fall out of my mouth when we go to Chicago or Houston or San Francisco or wherever we're visiting. And it's not free. What do you mean it's $7 to park and $10 for children under 8? What the hell is that all about? Do we really need to go there? Isn't there a park with a playground instead? But we go, at least to some of the places--I don't go to zoos elsewhere, but I will visit other art museums. Children's museums make me insane, but I like the one in Houston well enough. And I like specific museums, like ones dedicated to baseball or dogs or steamships.

There's something to be said for my tax money supporting cultural institutions, so that the art museum can live up to its tag line: dedicated to art and free to all.

14. Graffiti

Graffiti (from the Italian, for scribbling) occurs in two different categories here on the south side. The first is true scribbling--gang tags and wannabe gang tags. We walked out of the house one day to find Mike's car tagged with a sharpie marker, reading "Big Ass." I didn't take it personally. Bus stops, mailboxes, newspaper vending boxes (what do you call those things?), billboards, and occasionally something more intricate on the side of an abandoned building.

When one happens close to home (like my car), I report it to our local precinct, and sometimes I get a call from the gang taskforce. Big Ass, by the way, isn't any known mover or shaker--a wannabe. For now. Other times, like in 2000 when the back building on the corner was cleared of its squatters and drug dealers, it does mean something--the sidewalk running in front of the building was spray-painted with the gang equivalent of a change of address form.

The other graffiti is anarchist. Yes, anarchists. They spray-paint slogans. Cryptic slogans like "The underground railroad is still running" with a huge question mark below it. Or, on a boarded up building at Lafayette and Compton: "Things are still not equal," with the same punctuation. The standard A in a circle symbol. They interest me in a way that the taggers do not. For instance, they seem to be trying to communicate with ME, not with other anarchists (or, at least, they aren't writing in code). I may not know exactly what they mean most of the time, but when they write "Die yuppie scum" I sure do. Methinks they perchance would not like me.

13. Marbles

My house is 104 years old. I used to think it was 105, but the land was bought in 1904 and the house built in 1905. So my title search/abstract that Mary gave us when we moved in is for the land, not necessarily the house. The folks who owned it first, the Zieglers, owned it for only two years--I can only assume they were the buildesr.

Since then, three families. I've lived here 11 years.. The other two families, the Woltjens and the Kimpler-Murphy-Chapman clan (the Widow Kimpler became the Widow Chapman became the Widow Murphy and then she died, leaving the house to her daughter Mary), take up the remaining 91 years. I know very little about them, and what I do know isn't very complimentary. Mrs. Murphy ran the place as a boarding house. We still have deadbolts (or the holes from the removed deadbolts) on the bedroom doors. There was a makeshift kitchen in the second floor back bedroom (now part of the bathroom). The butler's pantry was ravaged and left as a 3/4 bath with the worst fixtures I've ever seen in any house. When Mrs. Murphy died, and Mary inherited the house, she let her indigent brother live in the basement. She didn't do anything really bad to the house, really. She had the kitchen redone in 1980; our bedroom and the living and dining rooms were given new ceilings around that time. None of it is really that great, though, and every time we change something, I think about how there's one fewer reminder of the Chapman-Murphy mistakes. Like when I finally painted over our hideous bedroom wallpaper.

There's not much left from the former residents these days. A heating oil tank in the basement is hardly sentimental. We haven't mustered the energy to rehab that butler's pantry bathroom, and so we just shut the door for now. That's about it.

But every spring I kneel down in the garden or in the yard, and out pops a marble. Way in back where I grow tomatoes. Under the back porch as I pull up the Virginia creeper vine. When I helped my grandmother plant daffodils. When I put in my two peonies. Front and back yards, one or two each year.

Mary Chapman, I must remember, was born and raised here along with her brothers. They weren't always indigent alcoholics. The Pelikanos family lived two doors down. I'm sure they had a bunch of kids. Are the marbles from the 60s, played with by my father's contemporaries, or are they from the 20's, shot across a dirt playing field by boys my grandfather's age now? I don't know how to appraise marbles like I might a quilt. But I liked this little literal souvenir, and so I kept them in a jar in my kitchen window.

My mom noticed them at some point and thought I was collecting them with some purpose. She picked some up at an antique mall. Now, I have a problem with collections. I love little things. So I didn't suppress this. Only about a third of my marbles are from my yard, but I know which ones are, for the most part.

I held the belief that these were unique to my experience somehow. There are marbles in my yard. This is special. Then I helped my sister move from a two-family flat on Tholozan, and as I was getting directions to the new place, one foot in the car, I looked down. A little orange and white marble, not new, was wedged between the dirt and the curb, exposed by a table leg that had scraped against the ground.

It made me want to take a giant rake to south city and find all the remnants of childhood underneath the daylilies and juniper bushes.