LETTERS FROM HOME: A PLACE TO COME WHEN YOU'RE TRYING TO FIND YOUR WAY

Nov. 5, 1998

Dear Pat,

Until DC, the idea that you could love a building seemed foreign to me. They were made of bricks and concrete but had no heart and soul, I thought, nothing to love.

But I cringed whenever my parents even talked about someday selling their house, the place I called home. And after moving back to Cape Girardeau from California early this decade, I often walked the downtown streets looking at the fine old houses, wondering if someday one would be called home. Now it is.

Now I'm convinced that one of the reasons I have worked at the newspaper three different times is my affection for the building that houses it. My father worked for the newspaper, too, so I came inside many times as a child and more often sat outside in the car as the press churned out the day's edition, meaning he could come home.

The building stands at a corner of Broadway on a hill overlooking the Mississippi. The architecture is Spanish, a style popular at the turn of the century and found in a few other commercial buildings along Broadway -- the old Lueders photography studio, Dr. Tygett's office, the Surety building.

The roof is tile and so is part of the exterior, including a mosaic on a wall that illustrates something of the history of both newspapering and the city.

I climbed its second-floor steps many Saturday mornings on the way to deliver my first attempts at journalism. Some days those steps were steep, and other days I flew up them.

DC concerns herself with trying to preserve the city's old buildings. The cause is a noble one, I think, because these edifices aren't just cleverly piled bricks and mortar after all. In some way they still house the dreams that built them and something of everyone they ever kept warm.

This place has often sheltered me as I have tried to find my way.

The puppy who happened by our house last week is gone now, and terribly missed. We tried very hard to locate her owner, but in a way the puppy found her own way home.

It happened when DC and our friend Judy took the dogs for a stroll one afternoon last week. Hank and Lucy pull Judy's wheelchair and DC guides. They stopped by the newspaper to see me, so I took the puppy into the building, hoping someone might compulsively decide the moment had arrived to acquire a dog. She was so charming that everyone wanted to hold her. One went so far as to call his wife to discuss adoption.

But as we ventured into other parts of this friendly old building, where more people said "Wish I could," Beverly who works in accounting said Debra who works in accounting lost her puppy last week. A mother and puppy reunion ensued.

The puppy had been staying at her sister's friend's house way out Route K one day and wandered several miles across many busy intersections to wind up playing in the street in front of our house the next.

Despite everything we did to find the owner, she was finally located only through serendipity.

I'm not ascribing magical qualities to this building. It's just that good things accidentally seem to happen here.

Maybe a building is just a building until it becomes shelter.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.