Days of November Sunshine
Stuck in airports flying home for Thanksgiving gave me time to write. So today, one of a series of happy stories. Enjoy.
Every visit before, the way was barred.
November 2007
We had been to St. Louis' magnificent City Museum many times before, the marvelous place of tunnels and secrets shared before in the tale Sunday at the City Museum. We had explored with many friends from the Museum's deepest caverns up to the top of the highest stair -- but no further. For on every visit before, we were not permitted to follow the endless stair all the way up to open sky. But this time, amidst the last warmth of a late Indian Summer, the way was open. And for the first time for us, out onto the City Museum's once forbidden roof we ran.
November 2009
There was a giant slide, it's peak almost twelve stories above ground. There was an old fashioned ferris wheel and a scampering pond and more. And there were all the other areas of wonder that are the St. Louis City Museum, on and over and through we romped until the sun set and evening turned into late, late into the night. And the weekend had just begun!
It was less than two weeks since I had celebrated the glorious close of the 2009 Maryland Renaissance Festival season with many friends, among them Zach and Jesse ( Light from the White Hart. By sheerest luck, Zach's work just happened to bring him to St. Louis just two weeks later, I just happened to have a rare conincidental weekend free of clinical duty, and so they decided to make a trip of it, in one of my last few months in St Louis. They had arrived on Thursday night in time for a splendid dinner at one of the city's most famous Italian restaurants, Friday evening at the City Museum after my clinical duties had ended for the day, and then onwards into a glorious Indian Summer weekend...
Even for southerly St. Louis, a early November weekend with the mercury flirting with 80 degrees is unusual. Eighty degrees, sunny, and not a trace of the cloying humidity which usually curses warm days on the Missisipi floodplain -- a glory whose timing was perfect. And so it was to mighty forest park we went to spend the day.
Built for the 1905 Worlds Fair and Olympics, the great forests and fountains had been the setting of many tales told before in this journal: of sledding ( Art Hill and Bum Hollow) and music ( Painted on an Autumn Evening's Sky) and balloons ( The Great Forest Park Balloon Race). Now, we partook of another old st louis tradition; paddleboats from the boathouse, a picnic on the waters, lazy cruising across the lagoons and old sailing songs as a warm november sun fired the autumn leaves with gold.
And there was the Zoo, lions and tigers and bears; and there was sunday brunch on the plaza of the Coronado; and there was the splendor of the Cathedral Basilica. But before all too soon it was time to part at the airport, with one last round of hugs, they back to Ann Arbor; my back to duty in the ICU.
Another weekend of warm memories, days of November sunshine and summer.