Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Voyage St. Louis has an interview with the graphic artist who designed the cover for John Donnelly’s Gold and whose copy of a Dave Barry book I might have gotten food on my senior year of high school.

I was having lunch with a friend last week, and he commented on the prices at the local chain restaurant. Everything you could order came out to about $13 or $15 for a breakfast plate or a sandwich and side. I know, of course, because I remember when taking the family out for a meal came to $40 instead of $80, and that was just a couple of years ago. He has a larger family and has to be more frugal, so he probably doesn’t eat out that often. Neither do we these days, it seems; when reconciling accounts recently, I only came across two restaurant receipts. Time was that we accrued a stack of them in the month, with a couple of trips to fast food places and a couple of sit-down restaurant trips. But even McDonalds is $15 a person these days, so, nah.

But: I ordered a sandwich and a salad, and the salad came with a sliced hard-boiled egg. For free. It was only a couple of years ago when eggs were $5 a dozen, and this very restaurant had an egg surcharge. But here I got one, for free. And I remember a time, a long time ago, when you could have dinner at this restaurant–after the installation service for a pastor friend, we had dinner here, and I remember being upset that my then-young son put my suit at risk of a stain. Perhaps even the son who later purloined that very suit. But after the restaurant reopened in 2020, it only had breakfast and lunch hours, and the menu is reduced accordingly. But I remember.

Since we have an election coming up, news outlets are thumping the gas prices thing. They are up, but some of us remember other times when they were high. Apparently, I posted on Facebook about a near $50 fill-up, and my ha’brother posted a photo of the gas pump of a recent filling in Wisconsin:

That’s $3.96 gas fourteen years ago, pre-inflation, pre-$15 minimum wage. A commenter at Founding Questions yesterday, reminiscing about the 1990s, pegs gas prices in 1995 at $1.20 a gallon when the minimum wage was $4.25 an hour. I haven’t delved into official statistics, but that seems to track with what I remember, and note that the price of gas then was around 1/4 minimum wage. Kind of like today.

But memory, and perspective, won’t get people wee-weed up. I used that expression the other day with my beautiful wife, and she said she had never heard it.

As I mentioned, my beautiful wife and I went downtown and had a date night which ended at the Hotel Vandivort where we spent the night, paying double what we might have if we had checked hotel prices first and bought tickets to match. I suggested the excursion because 1) I just read 1001 Ways To Be Romantic and realized that I’m responsible for suggesting/setting up date nights which are not professional events and 2) one of the members of my BJJ school whom I have never met posted on the school’s Facebook group that he and his young daughter were in Les Misérables, but since his daughter is in elementary school, she was pairing in her role with another kid, so we had to pick a night when both were performing (for some reason; I don’t actually know the fellow, but I guess both of them study at the school?). A convenient Friday night performance coincided with the night before a big MSU football game, though, and after buying tickets, I discovered that the hotels downtown were almost booked up. Except for the Vandivort, which had rooms, but, as I said, double what they were most nights. Surge/algorithmic pricing for the loss!

At any rate, the Vandivort is a new boutique hotel (right next to the historic Landers Theater where the show performed? What verb does a show do?). It’s really nice, though, with spacious rooms and actual robes in the closet (when putting the luggage away, I thought, “Why did we bring coats?” because it was almost 100 degrees outside).

But: It is a converted industrial building, so the room had a loft feel to it. The room was larger than you get at some boutique hotels, especially the ones like Tru which are smaller rooms with no furniture in them. Also, the Vandivort is not tall; it’s four stories, and we were on the third floor. So it’s not sold for the view.

My beautiful wife went to the window and noted the green she could see: A little square below us with a planter with elephant ears and what looked like banana leaves in a planter; a patch of grass next to a small parking lot by the Vandivort’s second building; and a tree on South Street.

Ah, but gentle reader, maybe I am just a city boy, but I find this view entertaining and fascinating as well.

There’s a ramp to…. What, an old loading dock? We’re looking out on the back of what used to be the Outland Ballroom which closed down. We’ve got some textures in the different brick buildings, including one that has what looks to be a shed atop it, but that’s really where the old elevator equipment was housed (thanks, Answer Man!). If you go all the way to the window, you can see the lit alley below. Springfield is a relatively safe little city (this shooting was blocks away!), so people will walk down this alley without fear.

You know, gentle reader, that when I go on vacation, I like a balcony or deck that looks out on trees and/or water where I can sit and read. Most hotels do not offer this amenity, but I still like to sit and look out the window at whatever the city or location has to offer. A parking lot, distant buildings, and a highway? I’ll watch the cars go by. The backside of office buildings and electrical transformers? I will watch the birds as they settle on the facades.

I dunno if that makes me an outlier of some sort who can appreciate even different walls to look at. Although I guess the exception is really old hotels where your room looks out on an air shaft or a U-shaped hotel where you’re deep in the U and can only see a sliver of the street.

Perhaps, too, I travel seldom enough that all of this is always novel.

As I mentioned, we went to the book sale this weekend. And although I do not generally target the book sections widely, I did come away with some purchases.

My beautiful wife also got a stack of books and the oldest got a history of Wales (perhaps because Noggle has Welsh origins).

As far as books go, I got:

• Misselhorn’s Pencil Sketches of St. Louis.
• Electricity for All: The Story of Ozark Electic Cooperative, 1937-2012. This is my electric coop from the time it began to after I moved into Nogglestead. Incredible to think that someone had corporate historian work into the 21st century. I myself have thought a history of one of my martial arts schools, which has been around for over thirty years, would be a cool book with stories about some of the students (the other school has been around for six or seven years, so its history much more brief).
• The Artwork of Emily McGee which is not only a monograph but shows how different works develop–that is, step-by-step (not quite) illustrations/images of the works’ progress.
• Pleasures of the Porch: Ideas for Gracious Outdoor Living by Daria Price Bowman and Maureen Lamarca. I actually got this at BookMarx, the downtown bookstore, on Friday afternoon. The theatre and the place where we stayed was a block from BookMarx and across the street from Stick It In Your Ear record store. We went to BookMarx so my wife could pet the cat. I was not eager to browse/buy on Friday night when books were going to be fifty cents on Saturday, but the prices at BookMarx were reasonable, and I got this on the dollar cart.
• Sheer Poetry: Words & Photographs by Rosalie Toler and Gerry Toler.
• The Spoken Word Revolution edited by Mark Eleveld. A collection of open mic / poetry slam type poetry that originally came with a CD, but that is absent. Still, I can read them myself.
• Peter Abelard by Helen Waddell. As I mentioned, Abelard came up not only in the collection The Rape of the Lock but also the audio course I’m currently listening to, so of course I had to pick up his biography.
• Selected Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Of course, I have probably already read them. My first thought was that I could give the book to someone as a gift, and I even asked my wife to whom I might be able to give it. But she cautioned me that it might be taken a certain way. After all, I gave her a copy back in the day. So I’ll just put this in my stacks as an excuse to read these poems again. After all, I pick up old Harper editions of her books when I find them just for that reason. And in this case, I spare it from becoming cat litter.
• Two literary magazine issues, Frost Meadow Review Volume 9 from 2022 and River Styx, the St. Louis literary magazine, from 2021. I prefer to find physical magazines to submit to rather than just scrolling Submittable.
• Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce by Robert Penn Warren. A single poem former textbook probably.
• The Messenger by Stephanie Pippin, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize in 2013 which is why it has cycled out of the library’s collection–that’s fourteen years ago!
• Joe DiMaggio Moves Like Liquid Light, poems by Loren Broaddus.
• Circle of Ecstasy: A Haiku Neophyte at 76 by Antonio S. Dimalanta, MD.
• Gentle Harvest: Poetic Moods and Memories of a Woman’s Life by Florence Burrill Jacobs. Strangely, the title page has been removed, but the dust jacket has her name. No idea the year, though.
• How Reading Changed My Life by Anna Quindlen. A short book suitable for college students, but maybe not any more.
• Rocky Comfort by Wayne Holmes, an autobiography or memoir. Is the difference how important you are or the completeness? At any rate, likely one of the regional reminiscences that I love.
• The Story of Old Ste. Genevieve by Gregory M. Franzwa. It might come in handy if I read it before I go to the town so I can tell anyone I’m with bits about it. Usually, I find these books when I’m visiting the town and can only tell about it later.
• Parenting Advice to Ignore in Art and Life by Nicole Tersigni. A modern looking collection of memeish quips.

To be honest, given the various different payments and the other books included for other people, I am not sure how much I spent. $20? I know when I came through the bargain side, the book counter did not bother to count the poetry books because he said they weren’t anything. I disagreed, but I guess I got a bit of a discount.

And, again, I was not jonesing to buy more audio courses, as I’ve gotten them down to a mere two boxes in my closet, but they’re marked less than ten dollars each, down from forty bucks a couple of years ago, so I was getting complete audio courses for $2 or $5. So I got:

• After the New Testament: The Writings of the Apostolic Fathers
• Maya to Aztec: Ancient Mesoamerica Revealed
• Famous Greeks which would have fit in with my reading of The Life of Greece. Given how many years it’s taken me to work through The Life of Greece, I still might listen to this years from now in the middle of the book.
• The Birth of the Modern Mind: The Intellectual History of the 17th and 18th Centuries which I will have on tap for when I get to the equivalent volume of The Story of Civilization if I get there.
• Resolute Determination: Napoleon and the French Empire. Ibid about the maybe I’ll listen to it when reading about that part of history. Or maybe sooner.
• The Russian Revolution: From Tsarism to Bolshevism. Likely no mention of Doctor Zhivago. Well…. Never say never.

At any rate, I’m looking forward to reading these books, actually. Unfortunately, after completing the bulleted lists above, I moved them from my desk to my stacks, and I likely won’t see any of them again for a long time. Unless the bookshelves collapse under the weight again or the cats knock them down because I’ve put most of them stacked horizontally atop the bookshelves, and the cats like to prowl behind them when choosing a bladed weapon.

In 2012, when I was dabbling with the Missouri Insight, I did a series of bits on small towns in Missouri, and I talked about Republic and Brookline:

Where Washington Avenue (the name of Commercial Lane after a couple of curves) meets Highway MM, you find the post office that serves Brookline and Republic (and Battlefield, and other parts of Greene County):

The Brookline Post Office

It’s a two-room cinderblock building where one of the rooms is a lobby and the other half loads mail for our rural postal carriers. I’ve been in on occasion. Nadine is always friendly, giving my child leftover stickers or stamping his hand SPOILED. What, your post office has more than one clerk? That, my friends, is urban.

At any rate, I was driving into Brookline to vote today. I drive twenty minutes at highway speeds to get to my polling place, checked once by a stop sign and twice by traffic signals. I filled out my scantrons and stepped out of the polling station, a Republic Fire District station (professionals, although part of the near parts of Republic including my domicile are covered by the volunteers).

Here’s what I saw from the doorway. Forgive me for not stitching them together for you:

Views from my polling place

Views from my polling place

Views from my polling place

Views from my polling place

The only thing in sight is a Church of Christ.

If you want to see the photos, you’ll have to click through. And if you’ll pardon me, but I don’t have photos this time, but just a description of what’s changed.

The post office is still there; it never really handled Republic’s mail–there’s a post office down off of Highway 60 that handles it–and the Brookline post office no longer handles our mail–it’s handled by the larger Republic post office. The Brookline post office is just a storefront that sells stamps now and has a wall of post office boxes. Nadine is gone now, as are her replacements including Mark, the only other one whose name comes to mind. I haven’t been to that post office in a long time.

Our polling place is no longer at the fire house. Instead, the whole family now votes across the street at the aforementioned Church of Christ.

The intersection of MM and Sawyer Road there now has a stop light. And a giant Amazon warehouse. And a strip mall servicing trucks coming out of the various new warehouses in the area. And the Iron Grain District which is a “mixed use” development which has at least one restaurant and coffee shop plus other things, including a large gas station. There’s another large gas station across from the post office. And they’re talking about widening MM from 60 to the interstate to better accommodate the big trucks.

When we moved here, we expected the suburbs to expand west on Highway M / Republic Road, but they followed Highway 60 from west Springfield instead. New shopping centers and apartment complexes are working to fill that empty space, but the lot on the corner of FF and M remains mostly empty even after having been for sale and development for most of the time we’ve been at Nogglestead. It didn’t help that the local wireless retailer put its home office in the middle of it, which might keep it from developing as retail.

But over time, I guess everything changes. But I’m still mostly the same. Which probably says something about me, and perhaps not something good.

So for a while, off and on, I’ve been buying frozen treats for the family. Fruit juice bars in the past or ice cream sandwiches. I got away from it for a while when we skint, but our income situation has returned to an income situation, and we’re not hemorrhaging money like last year, so I’ve started picking up the frozen treats again, a ten-spot a week during the peak of summer. And although my youngest has made a habit–and, basically, a complete diet–of the ice cream sandwiches in the recent past, I have been the one eating most of them the last week or so.

Last week, on a lark, I bought a box of Drumsticks as well. If you’re not familiar, Drumsticks are ice cream cones with a chocolate and nut covering, akin to the dip you might get at Dairy Queen or other places. However, they’re pretty hard as they’re all frozen and individually wrapped unlike, say, soft serve dipped to order in molten syrup. And I shouldn’t say it was a lark, really, as I’d seen the boxes in the warehouse club freezers and thought about picking up a box for a couple of weeks before I actually did.

But, ah, gentle reader. How each one takes me back, just a little, to 1996.

I was living with my sainted mother in Lemay, Missouri. I lived with her after the university for two and a half years, and it seemed like such a long time. Those were busier days, then, and my perspective on time was that of a young man, where every year was a larger portion of my life than it is today. But now that my boys are on the cusp of leaving me, probably in less than that time frame, it doesn’t seem that long at all.

My mother handled all the shopping, such as it was. Not a lot of fresh produce–some apples and snack fruit, probably–and not a lot of things for home cooking–in addition to not being much of a cook (neither she nor, by her tutelage, me). Also, she worked second shift. The freezer was stocked with frozen things–and she would call the house line every night on her way home from work (she had a cellular phone, gentle reader, in the middle 1990s, in a bag) to ask me if she wanted me to pick up a Taco Bell Big Beef Burrito Supreme on her way home. She ate Taco Bell nightly, and would share the bounty with me if I were home and awake.

My goodness, she and I could eat nothing but junk in those days. I lived on frozen pizzas and Taco Bell and other fast food, and I tried to gain weight and lifted weights, but to no avail. I was eating several thousand calories a day, including weight gain shakes, and nothing. We both were skin bags over bones.

The freezer also has another treat: Drumsticks. The warehouse club was way up in Earth City in those days, an hour away by car, so she was not buying them in bulk, but the freezer almost always had Drumsticks in them. Oh, boy, and did I eat them. What was I doing at the time? Laying out the St. Louis Artesian? Hanging out in the gap between jobs? Playing Gemstone Warrior 3 on America Online? I had two jobs, spent a lot of time at coffee shops and open mike nights, and still somehow had a lot of time to sit in my mother’s (well, my aunt’s) house and eat Drumsticks.

I shall probably look back at this time of my life and say, “Wow, I had a lot of time.” And I spent it eating Drumsticks and feeling, briefly, twenty-four again.