LETTERS FROM HOME: CRAWLING THROUGH CURVED SPACE TO THE TOP OF ST. LOUIS

July 31, 1997

Dear Julie,

Since you've never been to the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, I will describe the experience for you. After passing through a metal detector, you and four other people you may or may not know squeeze through a doggy door into a windowless compartment the size of a pygmy closet, where you sit knee by jowl during a cacophonous and claustrophobic four-minute tram ride through the Arch's curved leg, eventually reaching the top, where you and many others just as glad the ride is over jostle for a peek out windows that offer a panoramic view of metropolitan St. Louis on one side and the ghetto known as East St. Louis on the other.

Louis is OK as cities go but the only thing remarkable about its skyline is the structure you are viewing the city from.

Once at the top, I watched longingly as Busch Stadium filled up for a baseball game. DC confessed to being afraid the whole time: of bombs, of an earthquake, of the tram getting stuck.

After five minutes of looking around, you're ready to reverse the pygmy closet experience.

Every Missourian ought to go up the Arch once every lifetime, I suppose, to prove we aren't like the so-sophisticated New Yorkers who've never climbed the Statue of Liberty. But once is enough. Twice is the fulfillment of some familial responsibility.

DC and I were in St. Louis to see the Neosho nieces. That's a different experience now than it was four years ago when I first met them. Two are teen-agers now. They inhabit a secret world adults are seldom allowed in. They are not more distant, precisely, only more self-contained and self-conscious, a paradox that feels vaguely uncomfortable for everyone.

Unlike children, they are compartmentalized.

Much like a trip to the top of the Arch.

Not to say the nieces aren't still girls. They wanted to ride in our van so they could stick their heads out of the sunroof as we slowly paraded out of various parking lots. And they got all dressed up to go see a production of "A Chorus Line" at an outdoor theater.

This is the second summer we've all gone to an outdoor musical together. I think it's now a tradition.

The night was hot and close. The show was thrilling.

"One," the final number that fills the stage with dancers glittering in gold lame, made me want to go home and sign up for Miss Sherri's Royale Academy of Dance Arts and Ballet.

The nieces are all dancers. The grandparents usually make them recreate their latest show when they visit, though this year Danica, the eldest, declined. How teen-agerly.

In St. Louis, she kept falling off her platform shoes.

If their mom wanted to give them a primer in the hard-knock life of a hoofer, "A Chorus Line" is it.

Their mom loves outdoor musicals at The Muny. The family went there summers when she and her sisters were children, all of them hoping they'd be treated to an orangeade.

There are things children remember forever, and parents never know what they might be. Music in the night and wanting an orangeade. Or contorting yourself into a cubicle that crawled through curved space to the top of St. Louis.

Love, Sam

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