Meet Me in St Louis

Trekking 4 to St Louis for Thanksgiving was a major outlay, but worth it to see old friends and Grandpa Soule, just hours away in Illinois.  I have to admit, having turned 56, more often I say, "It's only money" - a thought I first had when we first came home with Michael and shlepping everyone to another supermarket to find a better price on produce just wasn't worth it. 

We were greeted by snow the next day!  Michael approves.

  The old
 friend was Beth, who was Carolyn's college roommate, and has lived in St Louis for 3 years, just purchasing her first home in Kirkwood.  St Louis is a gateway Southern city - Beth's HOA still had segregation language on its books! - with colonial architecture.Carolyn's dad met us halfway in Springfield at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum just celebrating its 10th year.

A profoundly moving experience with a degree of dramatization just shy of a Disney-level of simulated fantasy, the museum delivered the narrative of slavery, highlighted (excaberated) by ongoing tensions in nearby Ferguson.Artifacts, such as this beautiful Union drum and the bed Lincoln died in, on special loan from another musuem.Former slaves enlisted in Union regiments, reminding of a civil war which launched the modern era in Japan where, in some ways, culturally speaking, the 'South' won. Former peasants, like these black slaves, became the new army, infuriating disenfranchised samurai, who were the professional military in feudal times.

Of course, having the tomb nearby lent solemnity to the entire visit.

 +++

The Kirkwood Farmer's Market turns into a Christmas Tree Lot run by a family since the '70s, offering impressive homemade candies, jams, unusual ornaments and a great array of greens.

Michael wanted to bring home a reindeer.

Even cross-shaped wreathes.

The science museum had a special Sherlock Holmes exhibit, with a very hands-on series of stations, challenging one's detective skills.

The actual living room...

and violin!
The detective genre marks the rise of science in literary culture, forming a rich interpretive grid of modernity tracing (erasing) those areas of a lost premodern heritage:  Prose conquers poetry, science religion, the State the church. Disparate deaths across a broad range of social life that I have spent a great of mental energy tracing myself.  Big question: what do you do once you solve the mystery?!!!

Michael reads from Lincoln's Thanksgiving Proclamation, which established the day as an annual event, linking previous observances going all the way back to Washington, whose 1789 public thanksgiving was read in part by Pastor Ron Lutjens of Old Orchard, where we attended a simple service on Thanksgiving morning.

A belated Happy Thanksgiving to all!