Day One, continued

Part 2: Alice doesn't live here anymore.

My grand idea of recreating my mother’s migration west down Route 66 from Chicago to Los Angeles in 1952 included a side trip 300 miles out of the way to the little town where my German grandmother’s farm once stood. A town of 536 as of the last census. A town that is no longer farmland; a town that has experienced little but poverty in the last hundred years. And as I approach an intersection where I can either continue on the highway to St. Louis or I can turn off and visit really what is just a ghost of the place from where my grandmother came, I remember that all my grandmother ever wanted to do was to get out of that farm town and to go to The City.

And to The City she went; first to St. Louis and then to Chicago. She never returned to her former rural roots. Would she want me to spend a few hours out of my way to visit something that was only remnants of the farm she grew up on, a shadow of a place she never really loved? I believe that my grandmother Alice (pragmatic as she was) would prefer that I keep going straight. Straight to the first City that Alice called home.

Meet me in St. Louis

I am still driving adrift in Amber Waves of Grain when I spot  the hazy but unmistakable St. Louis arch in the distance. As I approach the city, I am awed by the grandeur and beauty of the red-brick structures. I see that as a stamp of a time when St. Louis was the jewel in the crown of the Mighty Mississippi River. At the same time, I think back to what it would have been like for my grandmother to come off the farm and see this metropolis. Would it have been overwhelming? Would it have been a  relief? Looking at it from both history and posterity I laugh to myself that the same cluster of brick buildings that I see as a stamp of a time long gone, my grandmother would have seen as a symbol of life and opportunity.

Court House in Downtown St. Louis

I exit to downtown St. Louis but after about 10 minutes of driving down increasingly crowded  one-way streets with no parking other than valet for hotels in sight, I realize that trying to stop to find a bite to eat and some gas in downtown St. Louis is probably not the best idea.  Instead I hop back on the highway, drive west about 3 exits until I spot a sign that says “food.” I get off, start driving around start looking for this little Italian place called “Gian-Tony’s”. Not the little truck stop diner I was expecting to refuel my car and myself. As I drive down a residential street that runs alongside the highway, I roll down my windows. I feel the hot, sticky air seeping into my little car, bursting my air conditioned bubble. I hear cicadas screeching in the trees. I look at the houses and realize...that I am in the South! The sauna-like air, the shotgun Victorian houses; it’s not all that different from the other end of the Mississippi: New Orleans, where I used to call home.