LETTERS FROM HOME: WHEN SOMETHING LOST'S AND SOMETHING'S GAINED

June 22, 1995

Dear David,

From our bicycles, DC and I have watched the Mississippi River retreat to its banks over the past two weeks.

Not many days ago, we couldn't follow our usual route next to the river because the road was flooded and closed by the police. Now the water is gone, leaving behind dirt, a rotten backwater smell and not much else.

We pedaled through Smelterville a few mornings ago. The populous community of shacks and tidy little homes I remembered from the '50s and '60s is gone. Year after year of floods drove many people away, and the big one in '93 might have finished it.

I was down there talking to people that year. People said they didn't know if they'd come back. I talked to other people who'd long since left and were still grieving for the community they'd had to leave.

It was the kind of place where boys played soda-cap baseball behind a mom and pop store, and neighbor kids didn't go hungry when someone had a chicken in the pot.

Now, the few who still live there seem in no hurry to go back in.

DC said the place looks like a Vietnamese village after a napalm attack. Everything is brown, disintegrating and stinks of ruin.

If Smelterville is gone -- and I know many people no longer recognize the name -- then I guess a eulogy was in order.

It's been hot and humid around here the past few days. We're a bit worried because guests are arriving today to a house without air conditioning.

We do have fans. Overhead fans, window fans of many sizes and shapes, downstairs fans, upstairs fans. If we get them going all at once, maybe it'll feel like a tropical breeze. No problem.

My parents just returned from a Caribbean jazz cruise. They've been having a good time regaling people with their story of going to Oscar Peterson's stateroom and chatting with the great man awhile.

Oscar Peterson isn't the god to everyone that he is to jazz lovers, of course. Non-jazz lovers nod and wonder how the beaches were.

Yes, there were beaches, my mom says. But you should've heard Benny Green.

Saw "Batman" and "The Bridges of Madison County." Preferred the latter.

Maybe a superhero who started out as a cartoon character is destined to remain one, no matter how many filmmakers try to impose human dimensions on him. Splat! Bang! Pow! was good for me. Now he's a rubber fetishist with a vengeance hangup. Seen it on "Geraldo."

I didn't like the Robert Kincaid character in the "Madison County" book that much either. He seemed a bit of a Ralph Lauren cowboy. But Clint Eastwood gives him some heft, and the look of someone who knows what he's lost.

My dad took a picture of Oscar Peterson with his hands held up to the camera. Said he wanted a picture of the 10 fastest fingers in the world. In it, famously unfriendly Oscar has a smile almost as wide as the spread of those genius hands.

The irony in the picture is that he no longer uses his left hand to play because he had a stroke. With Oscar Peterson, jazz lovers say, it's hard to tell.

But even gods must learn to accept what is lost.

Love, Sam

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