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.