Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Kirkwood, Webster Groves residents walk the streets — every single one of them — in their towns:

Gabriella Ramirez, 16, and her mom, Deanna, set out to walk every single street in their town of Webster Groves. They completed their 160-mile journey in mid-June.

You know, when I lived in Old Trees, I had a baby who liked to ride in the stroller. So from the middle of 2006 to the middle of 2008, we roamed all over Old Trees for hours a day. The baby got up at 5am or so, and I’d feed him and take him for a two hour or so walk, and put him down for his morning nap. He’d wake up, have something to eat, and we’d go for our mid-day walk for a couple of hours, and then we would come home for his afternoon nap. He’d awaken somewhere in the mid-afternoon, and we would go out again for an hour or so. And maybe a little walk after dinner. We did this pretty much year-round, including 100 degree days in the summer and cold days in the winter where I’d put socks over his mittens. So we covered a lot of Old Trees, but not all of it.

We covered all of Tuxedo Park, Old Orchard, Webster Park, and Old Webster many times, but we were light on Sherwood, North Webster, and the other spots north of Lockwood (and the train tracks). Mostly because they were the most distant. A bit because some of the streets lacked sidewalks. Some, too, because North Webster is predominately black, and I have a policy of avoiding being the only one of anything anywhere (sure, some will call it RACISM, but I would feel the same about a predominately Serbian neighborhood like you find in south St. Louis).

In those days, before the iPhone and before smartphones took off, you didn’t have the ability to track the streets and your walks on an app; perhaps if I had gamified it, I would have made the effort toward completeness. And maybe got a book deal out of it. You know, the things I do, I don’t think about writing a book about. Maybe I should if I ever want to be a Real Writer.

Our walking days pretty much ended in the middle of 2008 when the youngest came along. He had an internal timer for 20 minutes, and if he was in a car seat or a stroller for longer, he would begin to wail inconsolably until he was out. This limited our walking excursions and car trips for the most part, but in Old Trees, you weren’t twenty minutes away from most things you’d need–church, shopping, and even my sainted mother’s house was just a touch over twenty minutes away. So we got by, and he got less ornery before we moved to the country.

As to walking all the local roads, well, I have not walked them as the block across the street is 4.1 miles around (4.2 on the bike), and the block we live in is 8.2 miles around by bike (or so I mapped; I haven’t done it because one side of the block is a two-lane farm road with no shoulder, no visibility, and lots of curves and hills that my beautiful wife doesn’t like to drive on, much less run or bike). So I have run on some of the major roads around, but not all of the cul-de-sacs and certainly not the private drives that abound in the neighborhood.

Still, good on these kids in Old Trees and More Old Trees on their adventures.

The Kimble Group emails me from time-to-time with interesting “career opportunities.”

Like this one I received this week:

Assistant professor and health sciences librarian at Gozanga University’s Spokane, MO, campus. Since I live within 25 miles of Spokane, Missouri, I am a hot prospect for this job because, well, no one else in their database lives within 25 miles of Spokane, Missouri.

Word to the wise, kid: Gozanga is in Spokane, Washington.

Which removes my only qualification for this opportunity.

A while back (five years ago?), my youngest son’s class collected as many homophones as they could, so my son took a lot of pleasure running through his vocabulary and ours to discover ones that his classmates had not.

However, I was remiss at that time in not including tocsin, an alarm bell, and toxin, a poison generally of plant or animal origin.

You would think I would have been better prepared for that pairing as a reader of suspense novels, but Alistair MacLean novels are more full of klaxons of the alarums.

(The word tocsin brought to the forefront of my mind via this Bookworm Room post.)

A meme on Facebook.

As I mentioned in 2016, I took my boys too the old neighborhoods where I lived in Jefferson County:

So we hit St. Louis late in the morning, five hours ahead of our hotel check-in time, so I took the long way in, through Jefferson County where I could show the boys a couple places where I lived. The house in the valley in House Springs looked pretty dilapidated; the garage door had been replaced with a worn piece of plywood. Sometime around the time I left, the gravel road had been paved, but it doesn’t look as though it had been maintained at all, which is worse than having never been paved at all. I showed the boys where the mobile home I’d lived in for four years had sat, but Siesta Manor Mobile Home Park had rearranged the layout of the pads over time, so there wasn’t a 106 Quintana any more. After taking some flowers to my mother’s plot in the cemetery at Jefferson Barracks, we drove slowly by the house in Old Trees–the only house I’m sad to have left–and saw the lilies I planted ten years ago are six feet tall. We stopped at Blackburn Park, where the oldest played when he was one year old, and were the only people in the park on a Friday afternoon.

Then we headed north. We drove by the house in Casinoport, which looked much the same as it had or better. Most of the time we lived there, it was white asbestos shingle, but we had siding put on right before we left, so it looked better as we left than most of the time we lived there. We got to St. Charles, and I showed the boys a house where I lived with my aunt and uncle–who I grew up thinking were well-to-do but it turns out they were just doing better than we were. We checked into the hotel and had dinner at the Cracker Barrel nearby, which was good as the area around the St. Charles Convention Center was all torn up.

I drove past my aunt’s old house where we lived in her guest room and basement for a year and a half. Several times, actually, in the course of my travels to St. Louis.

Pretty much every time we go to St. Louis, though, I do drive by the house in Old Trees. As I mentioned, that’s the only place I’m a bit sad I left. It’s right off of Interstate 44, the road from Springfield to St. Louis, so it’s not far off of the path from where I’m going if I’m going to something in St. Louis County (it is not on the way to St. Charles, though, so I didn’t drive by it every time I was in the area last year).

However, other places I lived, I’m not sure I’m comfortable driving through.

The house I lived in when I lived with my mother in Lemay is in a sketchy area. It was sketchy then, but I was young and a bit angry-looking (albeit a skinny angry). I might drive past it, but I really haven’t the times I’ve been in the area to visit my mother’s grave at Jefferson Barracks.

The places I lived in Milwaukee. Well. I would certainly not drive by my house in the projects at night, and I haven’t really felt the need to go by it in the daytime when I’ve been in Milwaukee, either. The neighborhood where my father lived, and I lived in his basement during college, probably has not transitioned too badly, but the house where we lived the last month in Milwaukee before decamping for Missouri–the lease on our apartment in the projects ended before the school year, so we stayed with one of my mother’s friends until school ended and we moved (and my mother did not tell my father where we were for that month as a bit of a dirty trick–their marriage did not end amicably to say the least), well, that neighborhood has been in transition ever since, so I might drive by it, or I might not.

You know, the last couple of times I’ve been to Milwaukee have been transitional–we’re driving through it on the way to Wisconsin Dells, or we stayed in Germantown to visit my grandmother who lives outside the Milwaukee suburbs. Even when I was visiting Milwaukee in the 1990s and early part of the 2000s, I was staying downtown and did not get to the northwest side very often.

Do I get a sense of nostalgia when I do? You know, not really–I get more from my memory than the places themselves since they’ve changed enought that I only sort of recognize them. Or I’ve changed that much. Although given how I hang onto physical things for memories’ sake, perhaps it is more that the things have changed than me in this case.