72 Hours in The Heartland

POSTED BY: PHOENIX
PUBLISHED IN CHI-‘CAPITAL OF THE RUST BELT’-TOWN

I went to St. Louis for the weekend to visit Stephanie and it was GREAT. I haven’t laughed so much in a long time. It was a time properly accoutered with Splash cloves, organic sandwiches, oranges, hiking, music, pagan dancing, an AA meeting, a multi-cultural church service, African food, Speed Scrabble, a walking tour of Washington University, heavy hors d’oeuvres with social workers, dim sum, sculpture gardens, et c.

I came in to STL on Amtrak’s Lincoln Express Line, which operates on leased Union Pacific rail. It was a white-hot nightmare. Talk about stop-and-go. I finally arrived at St. Louis Union Station 7 hours after leaving Chicago, and took in a view of the Arch obscured by freeway junctions and swaths of underserved communities while I waited for Stephanie to arrive. A great introduction to one of the most racially segregated cities in the nation.

Wash U, on the other hand is glorious; pristine streets, manicured lawns, stately mansions, black-frame-bespectacled cognoscenti – the complete works. I met a couple of homosexual, fanny-pack-outfitted, turquoise-bejeweled feminist lecturers with freshly shorn high-and-tights, and understated, monochromous, German-minimalist mock tops. I learned later that at least one of these women is the bane of many students’ experience in the School of Social Work; shocking.

During a walk in the woods on a trail flanked against the freeway, Stephanie and I decided to change our names to that which we have always wanted to be called: Malia and Phoenix respectively. This is fitting on so many different levels it would be non-sense to try to elucidate through such a finite medium as the blog, but suffice it to say it was a landmark moment in the collective narrative of two very sinewy, quasi-Hebraic beings.

Much of my time was spent intermittently in Stephanie’s housing unit, dubbed “the box.” It was a tranquil, meditative space that really made the down-time a highlight for me. Picture a small room of photos, fragrances, books, beds, fresh air, and an empty refrigerator set in a small forest abuzz with mating birds and populated by one, solitary, brooding mathematician, and you will begin to imagine that place in which Malia has chosen to reside; sheer brilliance.

My return to Chicago was, of course, not without incident; long story short I met the conductors of the rail and was prelected to on the fascinating, convoluted, and sometimes downright befuddling world of passenger rail in the Midwest. I enjoyed every second of it, and to be honest it was more than reminiscent to me of a time when Eliz and I were traversing China and spent much of the evening on an over-nighter from Shanghai to Beijing smoking hand-rolled cigarettes with the conductors as they consumed more chicken feet than I cared to count.