{"id":25106,"date":"2019-09-30T07:41:55","date_gmt":"2019-09-30T12:41:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=25106"},"modified":"2019-11-28T08:54:45","modified_gmt":"2019-11-28T14:54:45","slug":"brian-j-returns-to-st-charles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2019\/09\/30\/brian-j-returns-to-st-charles\/","title":{"rendered":"Brian J. Returns to St. Charles"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Over the weekend, I drove up to St. Charles to visit my aunt.  Powered by Gummy Worms and bottled tea and audio courses, I made the trip on Friday night and stayed at the Tru by Hilton at the streets of St. Charles based on a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dustbury.com\/archives\/28840\" target=\"_new\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">mention Charles made<\/a> not long before he passed away.  Although he was complimentary about his stay, I didn&#8217;t think much of the place.  The room was smaller than a Hampton Inn, with just a bed, a table over a small refrigerator, a rolling table the size of a hospital table, and a rolling chair jammed next to the bed.  The other table spaces were a couple inches of shelving attached to the wall.  The whole thing seemed to be designed to resemble a dormitory&#8211;the common spaces were brighter and designed for working\/hanging out, complete with coffee all night and a pool table.  But the Streets of St. Charles Tru was more expensive than the place Charles stayed&#8211;and was likely more expensive than the Hampton Inn&#8211;so I&#8217;ll probably not stay at the chain again, opting for Hampton Inn for lesser stays and actual <em>Hilton<\/em> Hiltons for the more luxe stays.<\/p>\n<p>I did get the best room in the joint, though:<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/bsgfx\/311.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>&#8220;311&#8221; is my favorite Hiroshima song.<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/8_EgwxPR98o\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>I thought I&#8217;d mention it to the clerk at check-in, but the song was older than she was by at least a decade.<\/p>\n<p>The Streets of Saint Charles is a rather recent development in St. Charles.  It&#8217;s a New Urbanist style block that has a couple of hotels, some apartments, dining, and shops.  I might have liked to have lived in that sort of place when I was young, because it&#8217;s like a city without the dangers of living in a real city.  A city for suburban kids.  When I lived in the city, I lived in the city.<\/p>\n<p>I had some dinner at one of the restaurants, and I dumbfounded myself with remembering that I once lived in St. Charles.  I mean, I knew remembered it, but it was weird being there and <em>grokking<\/em> the knowledge.<\/p>\n<p>It was for about a year and a half, when we first moved to the St. Louis area.  We lived in my aunt&#8217;s basement whilst I was in sixth grade and part of seventh grade.  I thought of my aunt and uncle as rich, but it turns out that they were simply middle class and struggling a bit.  I would have mentioned to the server at the restaurant that I used to live in a mile or so away, but it was before she was born.<\/p>\n<p>On Saturday, I got up a little early and hoped to hit the hotel&#8217;s &#8220;fitness center,&#8221; but the two treadmills and single weight bench were already full, so I went for a run\/walk up to that house where I lived in St. Charles.  My rich aunt and uncle&#8217;s house.<\/p>\n<p>Which is a 1200 square foot ranch house.  Smaller than any house I&#8217;ve owned.<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/bsgfx\/734.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>It has three bedrooms, one bathroom (and a half, as I recall), a living room, and a kitchen\/dining room upstairs.  They refinished the basement while I lived there, which meant painting the walls and putting down a thin layer of carpeting, so that my mother, brother, and I could live down there for a while.<\/p>\n<p>Thirty-five years ago.  The neighborhood completely changed, of course&#8211;when we were there, it wasn&#8217;t much of a neighborhood.  There was a small subdivision (suitable for <a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2004\/11\/21\/1724\/\" target=\"_new\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">trick-or-treating<\/a>), but it was forests and farmlands from there to the river.<\/p>\n<p>Now, it&#8217;s all subdivisions.  The road has been widened into a boulevard with sidewalks on each side wherever subdivisions went in, and the houses in the subdivisions all have more than five rooms.  There&#8217;s an arena down the road and a Tru by Hilton.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s not <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=DQYNM6SjD_o\" target=\"_new\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">the house that built me<\/a>&#8211;by that time, we transitioned from the projects to this house to the trailer to the house down the gravel road in the valley so fast that I don&#8217;t have a place where I grew up aside from the transitions.  But it is a stop on the way.<\/p>\n<p>And when I returned to school after college, I never really wanted or aspired to live in St. Charles, even when I was working in a print shop a couple suburbs west.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m losing the people who knew me, and the places I once knew are changing beyond recognition.  Is it any wonder I cling to the <a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/category\/personal-relics\/\" target=\"_new\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">personal relics<\/a> so tightly?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Over the weekend, I drove up to St. Charles to visit my aunt. Powered by Gummy Worms and bottled tea and audio courses, I made the trip on Friday night and stayed at the Tru by Hilton at the streets of St. Charles based on a mention Charles made not long before he passed away. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25106"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25106\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25337,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25106\/revisions\/25337"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}