ORDINARY BEAUTY, MODEST MIRACLES:
Max’s Travel Journal, summer ’08
St. Louis, then to New Orleans via Amtrak, then on to LA.

CHAPTER TWO: The Spirit of St. Louis, page 2

Photo Album, continued: Spires of the South Side

     St. Francis de Sales Church, Ohio at Gravois, is one of the most impressive of the many spires that rise from the South Side. Im style, it's pure German Gothic. From up close, it’s truly massive, and gives off an Old Country feeling, so that you forget you're in the USA. The tower is gilded with a lot of gold that doesn't show up here.

  

   I love this cute little church, also downtown on Gravois, way down near the river. The tiny onion dome on the spire, and the large, mushroom dome, a pleasing shade of dark blue, sing Eastern Europe. I'd been unable to discover its name, but a friend in St. Louis just e-mailed me that it's called St. Michael's Russian Orthodox Church. She and her husband were married there five years ago this week!

Yet another of the glorious, old South Side churches. This one is on 7th Street in Soulard.

     

     The old Soulard area near the river is significantly gentrified. The particular old tenements shown above are not, of course, among
the more flashily upgraded buildings. They’re reminiscent, rather of the rows of ancient brick residences in Eastern cities like Philadelphia or Baltimore.
      The Soulard neighborhood has a historic Farmer’s Market, and the added perk of being perpetually drenched in the pungent smell of hops from the nearby, flagship Budweiser brewery! The Executive Offices of the Busch Company also remain in the area, as of now.

Coda to My Ride: Jim

     I stopped at a spanking-new Panera Bread bakery. The chain, if you’re fortunate enough to live in an area where its stores proliferate, has created by far the most laptop-friendly environment I’ve found, with soft colors, good lighting, enough space between tables, soft classical music, delicious food, and good coffee. The 1,185 bakery/restaurant/cafes, including one in Concord, California where I frequently spend my mornings, are all outgrowths of the St. Louis Bread Company, and remain headquartered in St. Louis.
      I discovered this one downtown on South 7th Street after the ride described above, and stopped there to gather my thoughts and start recording them on my computer. Returning to my table from the bathroom, I noticed a colorful, artistic-looking configuration of cards arranged upon the table next to mine.

     Nice design, nice message: You see, the New Age has penetrated even to what I once thought of as the “bowels” of South St. Louis. I got up the nerve to ask the gentle-looking man sitting at the table about the cards, and we talked for a few minutes. The card at right reads, "The measure of my SUCCESS is my joy."

     His name is Jim Bourne. Veteran of the ‘60s like me (he’s seventy-three), he's lived on the West Coast, but for some years has been back in St. Louis caring for his aged mother. We benignly talked metaphysics and contemporary history. The material Jim is works with as a personal consultant and workshop leader, as well as privately, is a “channeled” teaching. Such things can be tricky, and I haven’t personally explored the content. Regarding the title, Manifest Your Desires, I know beings of the highest consciousness unanimously say the Goal of life can only be attained through desirelessness. Some have said, though, "I give you what you want in the hope that you will come to want what I want to give you."
     I found the art work and design of the cards pleasant, as was Jim, himself. If you want to contact him: agapepeacemakerjim@yahoo.com .

The Ritual

     It's not true that I return to St. Louis to go to White Castle—just as it is not true that I moved to California to shop at Trader Joe’s, which now has several stores in the St. Louis area, but did not when I moved back west in '99. I go to St. Louis to visit Mother, and I moved to California to court Barbara.
     But it is equally true that I rarely, if ever, come to St. Louis without a stop at White Castle, whose crenellated pillbox eateries have traversed the realms of the kitschy and un-chic and circled back around to join the ranks of the “cool”. There's even smething about th stained-glass windows inscribed with the name of the chain and the word “Hamburgers”...enough of a "something" that, spending the vast majority of my days hundreds of miles from these minor monuments of architectural innovation, I occasionally find myself daydreaming up an image of one of them as some kind of symbol of the merger of the imaginative and the mundane 
     I don’t really consider my stops here (I’m writing this at the White Castle on Big Bend and Manchester) to be a genuine sacrament, or anything. I don’t want to debase the real thing. They're a kind of ironic ritual. I suppose in the end, it just boils down to fun.
    Of course Glenn Savan, a now-deceased novelist from nearby Clayton, has used these venues as a literary symbol in his book, White Palace. I haven’t read the novel, but I did see the film with Susan Sarandon and James Spader, and wept when the Manchester bus I know so well appeared timelessly on the screen.

on to CHAPTER TWO: The Spirit of St. Louis—Conclusion

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