(I didn't even get to 1400 words on my first day. Oh well. With luck I'll catch up Saturday.)
You are nearly asleep at the wheel. It is midnight; the play was long and the goodbyes reluctant. You drive the slow way home because you like to see things well and you canít see things from the highway. You begin in Maplewood on Manchester Road. You are in the town center of Maplewood, two or three blocks of quaint storefronts and rough-edged corner diners. Then the building facades grow increasingly grim. You jump railroad tracks, you leave behind that warehouse coated in green aluminum siding and painted with a giant ace of hearts.
Itís the same street, but now itís called Chouteau. It was named for Auguste Chouteauóa St. Louis name, not stolen, like the other name, from some English factory town. Chouteau is a genuine name, no pretence of being something it isnít. Auguste was one of the first Europeans to settle in this part of the world. He came with Pierre Laclede down the river at an age when it may have all been boy-adventuring; he was the boy who played explorer and founded a city. He was fifteen years old.
You are on his street, passing the long-since-drained Mill Creek (all railway cars and warehouses now). It is midnight, and you are tired, and you arenít really paying attention to where youíre going. You miss the street where you should have turned.
Further down you see California Avenue, which further south runs quite close to your house. The question is, can you use it to get to your house from here? Youíd know the answer if you were more awakeóyouíve always had to detour from California when traveling this far northóbut you make the experiment.
The night is clouded over so the sky is a dropped ceiling uncomfortably low. You are in a place of serious darknessóabandoned houses and failed streetlights. Ahead of you on the left is an open field, and rising from it, too thin, too high, is a tower. It is capped with a spire, like a steeple, but steeples generally have churches attached. This monument stands alone in the wild field, the unmown vacant lot so otherwise indistinguishable from hundreds of vacant lots dispersed through the city. Here you are at midnight, in a neglected but otherwise unremarkable part of town, and you are abruptly confronted with a tower.
The next morning, you learn. Once there was a Catholic church, St. Henryís, on those grounds. As mostly Baptist blacks moved in and the mostly Catholic whites moved out of the neighborhood, there wasnít enough of a congregation to justify having a church. So St. Henryís came downóbut the bell tower did not. Since itís tucked away on a side street, most probably wouldnít notice it. Theyíd see a steeple peeking above buildings and assume the rest of the structure must also be there.
You go back on a sunny day and photograph the tower in a heroic pose against the blue sky.
I want you to notice it. I want you to see all the windows, mostly broken, and the tan-gold brickwork, all intact. See the scarred silhouette on the towerís side, the impressions of the churchís touch. Think of it as a sign for your homeóa place both battered by neglect and protected by it, a secret still clutching life because those who would kill it are facing the opposite direction.