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.