My St. Louis

My parents moved our family to St. Louis when I was almost six. Actually, they moved us to the outskirts of West County (from Kensington, MD). They still live in the house where I grew up, about 30 minutes west of where I live now. I left home two months after I turned 17. Leaving home took me all over the place; out west, Europe, the Middle East. I came back to the US, to the St. Louis area about two years ago.

During those years away from here, I told people all the time that I grew up in St. Louis. Of course, That's really only the truth if you don't know anything about St. Louis, and at the time, I guess I didn't. But then the people I met usually didn't know anything about St. Louis either. Except one guy in the Army post office in Germany dropped his jaw when I told him I was from St. Louis. A nice girl like you?, he asked me. Really? St. Louis is tough, isn't it?

Well, out in the suburbs . . . all the way up until two or three years ago, I thought that I had been raised in the suburbs of St. Louis. But no, I wasn't. Now that I live in the suburbs of St. Louis, I realize that I actually grew up in the suburbs of the suburbs of St. Louis.

Because I grew up so far from the city, I often get the feeling that I could have grown up in any suburbs ANYWHERE in America and it would have been pretty much the same. You can't say that about cities and you can't say that about small towns either. Both have a sense of themselves as entities with their own history, character, and culture. Small town Illinois isn't the same as small town Georgia, just as Chicago definitely isn't Atlanta. But I bet you their suburbs are too similar to tell apart.

When I was a kid, downtown St. Louis was a foreign place. We went into the city on rare occasions only. Mom infrequently went to Soulard's Farmers Market, and there was a sheet-music shop not far from the market where she bought etude books for me and Joe and Suz. Add to those destinations a baseball game or two, and that would be a fair summary of my childhood exposure to the city of St. Louis. Everyone out in the suburbs believed the city was a dive, and either they were all wrong or they were all right. I might never know the answer to that particular mystery.

The city didn't start to become a place of interest for me until I was a teenager, but then I left at 17 before getting to know the city at all. One of the best things about coming back to St. Louis has been getting to know it and really feeling at home here. I'm really glad that I've had the chance. For me, St. Louis will always occupy a favored spot among all the places I have lived in the big world beyond the suburbs of it's suburbs.