Ah, gentle reader. As you might have gleaned from the tone of the blog lately, I’ve been fighting vainly the old ennui. But last week, I had a magical moment which might have set things aright, or at least made things a little better.
My beautiful wife had submitted, almost off-handedly, a talk for the cybersecurity day in St. Louis’s Tech Week, and it was accepted. So we decided to make a little trip of it–instead of driving up early on the day of the conference, we went up the night before and stayed two nights. We ended up stationed about two blocks from where I worked when I was an executive at a marketing agency, so I spent a little time while she was in a woman’s event in the early evening walking around, trying to remember where things were. Was it this corner where Carlos with the grill sold me lunch (two brats, plain)? Is this coffee shop where the Starbucks used to be, our daily destination for work breaks? And so on. A lot has changed in the 20 years since I left that office. I walked back to the women’s tech event to escort my wife back to our hotel (“Did you walk with me just for safety?” she asked on the drive back home. Yes.)
The room was nice; I sent a picture to my oldest, and he wanted to know about the foot traffic. Not a lot–a pedestrian every block or so. The hotel is right by the convention center. There are some offices and residences down there, I guess, but the big office towers are a little to the north and the well-known loft district is a little to the west. So the foot traffic is less than what we encounter in Springfield in its more compact and destination downtown. Not too many homeless around–no tent cities, just a couple people wandering around, one guy sprawled outside the venue where her women in tech event was held–and an associate who was trying to rouse him. The pocket park outside the Old Post Office was packed with the indigent, and I picked up the cap from a nip bottle on the bottom of a shoe like a single tap for a couple dozen yards–but I didn’t feel unsafe, just wary.
And our hotel room: Ah, I don’t know whether it was developed as a hotel or was originally a loft building chopped into a hotel. Our room had high ceilings–12 or more feet–and floor to ceiling windows as two walls. Nice, but the southern exposure meant the room warmed up. No problem: Blackout drapes for the win. But it was really nice, although I often punched the wrong button at the elevator because the restaurant, fitness center, and pool were on the upper floors of the five-story building.
At any rate, what about Jim Manley?
Well, gentle reader, as you might not be aware, Jim Manley is a St. Louis trumpet player who gets played plenty on WSIE, which I stream on my computer most days. When I decided to tag along to this conference, I started checking the calendars of the local jazz artists, and–well, I didn’t get far because Manley plays weekly on Wednesday nights at Sasha’s Wine Bar in Clayton. As my wife plays trumpet, I thought this would be the right choice, and it was.
We took a rideshare from another Tech Week event to Clayton, arriving two hours early, and we told the waitress we were in no hurry as we were there for Jim Manley. So we had a leisurely dinner, and our server told us she’d reserved one of her tables where he would play. Sasha’s is a charming little shop, a jumble of rooms carved out of two buildings on Demun, and Manley played in a barroom with, I guess, a retractable roof, which came in handy. His first set started at 8:30.
It was a low-key thing; he was just the guy in the corner with a trio (he started without his drummer, who arrived fifteen minutes late and maybe intoxicated). The other people in the room continued their conversations; we had a large table of a ladies night out beside us. But we were front and center, with chairs the server had turned to face Jim Manley. Nobody else knew it was a Jim Manley concert..
As he played, storms started rolling in from the west; when I turned to glance at my wife, she was framed by flashes of sheet lightning behind her. In the middle of his set, a downpour provided its own percussion. God didn’t know it was a Jim Manley concert.
After his first set, my wife went to talk to him, and he was very gracious as they talked trumpets and then came over to talk to me was well. Because I knew it was a Jim Manley concert.
We took advantage of a brief interlude in the storm to head back to our hotel; as we began, the tornado sirens went off with a tornado warning. As St. Louis had a bad tornado rip through last year, no doubt they’re pushing that button a lot this year–it was the same after the Joplin tornado down here, where the weather people lit it up many times the next year or so, reverting to the mean (one or two a year, maybe) in more recent years.
And after a chapel service at the Lutheran seminary just a couple blocks form Sasha’s, we returned home.
And, you know what? I will remember this trip with more pleasure than recent trips, such as Branson this January, Florida in December, or Big Cedar last May.
I mean, people in Clayton can go see Jim Manley every Wednesday. But would I? I dunno. When we lived in Old Trees, we lived two blocks from the theater where the opera theater group and the St. Louis Rep play, but I haven’t been there in…. Almost thirty years? I guess we were in a different place then, with very young children, but…. Eh, who knows? Before children, I/we got around a little more. But now it’s fairly rare, although maybe we’ll get around the Springfield area more often. Or maybe (and probably more likely), this trip, like my “trip to see Janet Evra” in 2019, will just underline how I enjoy these little concerts. More than I did when I lived in St. Louis and could see a corner musician in a coffee shop all the time. Perhaps these experiences are more meaningful because they are excursions, expeditions, and not just part of the background noise of everyday life.
Ah, well. Jim Manley didn’t have an CDs for sale, so I didn’t get any autographed, and it looks like his most recent releases are download-only. So when I get a couple bucks, I’ll order a couple of older releases on CD. Until then, I’ll hear him on WSIE almost daily.
