My Maria Garetti Story

I haven't been here in a long while. A 10 months long while.

In the interim I've gotten to France and Turkey, switched jobs, roommates, significant others. Lots of stuff.

And more recently found some reasons to come back to writing.

So I may be bringing more offerings again. Keep in mind they are personal musings often based on memory, permeable and imperfect at best, and may not follow the "facts" of life events for those of who may actually have been there. It's the emotional, or at least creatively most cohesive, story being told. But in the words of a famous program note writer, sometimes that's a truth of its own sort.

So I leave you for now, and begin anew, with an offering from childhood:


To me, Catholicism, the Magic River, and the family of my father are one, and they live in St. Louis.

Half of my family was raised Catholic, and in the days before my Dad stopped taking us to Missouri I saw them on a fairly regular bi yearly basis. While Chicago and its suburbs were home, Saint Louis was and remains in my mind a shadowy place, a world full of symbolic image and mythic size. Chicago was realism, devoided of its iconography, St. Louis held mystery intrigue, voo-doo hoo-doo magic.

My sister and I were the first grandchildren of a 9 child clan from my grandmother Ursie and faintly remembered grandfather. My earliest memories of St. Louis come in a bundle of 3: being thrown in the air by my grandpa G while searching out the evil snake/dog cloth log that blocked heat from getting in from the porch through the crack at the bottom of the door, the church across the street that my grandmother attended daily yet never brought me to and the frame of Jesus in the living room that faced it, and lastly, the River, the big one, barges and mud. These blend together in my brain into a single vision of the warmth and pain of that second home away from home.

My dad's family were always the bustling ones, unlike my Scandinavian relatives on my mom's side, the Germanic G's were loud, used to arguing for their needs and values (9 children the rule went, meant you accepted what there was and got as much of it as you could). Being the first heiresses to the kingdom, my sister and I were doted upon, told we were being doted upon, and told how lucky we were to be so doted upon. The center of attention at any family gathering, city-wide scavenger hunts were set up in out honor, all the relatives moving through parks, writing "clues" leading us back to a "stolen" doll in a spontaneous and collective interactive adventure. And because we were the first, we were, at least at the beginning, told the most careful version of the family history. The telling of it intended to be passed on, cleansed usually of its more dour parts. The stories of the larger than life joy of my grandfather's "good" times did not include the words "manic" and nowhere were they tempered with the flip side of the depression that he eventually succumbed to. The vague sadness of my grandmother in rare quiet moments together was fleeting, an aunt or uncle always quickly swooping in with a story or joke to cover the silences. Grandpa G became a single image, a painted portrait from his army days I'd seen once, a symbol and a vague memory of a literally grand father I had known but did not know anymore, though I was told he adored me with the ardor only a first grandchild can elicit.

Images and sensory memory of Creve Coeur, the area my grandmother lived in, are fluid and consistently do not reflect the actual geography I've noted in the few times I've returned. The church across the street, Sacred Heart or something to that general effect, I remember as huge, hulking, a giant block of religious iconography. Mysterious to me and thus tantalizing. At Christmas everyone would go to midnight mass and every year I begged, pleaded, cried to be allowed with the adults when they attended. The one year some poor aunt relented I feel asleep and was in tears for hours the next day, feeling as if I'd missed some bizarre and luscious magic show only playing across the street from my grandmother's home. My aunt O tried to make up from the loss by showing me an illustrated book of Saints (or perhaps simply describing it? the memory is never solid enough to be sure). We sat in the hall, with the Jesus portrait palpable in the next room, and she described Catholic school and the book and her desire as a girl to be daring like the female saints depicted within. Her descriptions of the pictures were vivid, lurid even, and as intended, they inspired me, made me surer than ever that St. Louis held a kind of spell and power I could only dream of in parts farther north. Missouri's heat and magic were entwined, one seeming to fuel the other so that even in the cold of winter, one had only to stand at the old steam furnaces to know there was a deep source of energy and warmth welling up from somewhere down below.

The last of the great St. Louis fantasies lay in the river, giant and rolling, brown and dingy, a secret keeping river. One of the more adventurous uncles, always a camera in hand to snap the opportune poetic image, would walk my sister and I down the "Secret Steps," really more an overgrown path, but it felt like trekking down a cliff. We would come to the bank and wave and dance for the barges, put our hands in the muddy water until someone couldn't take the thought of dirty children a moment longer. We took turns inventing stories about the river, sailors lost to opaque depths, or boats that slowly floated their way to its distant mouth. We treated the river as our own private place. I felt with a kind of knowing I've rarely found again, that whenever I saw a public lookout onto that rolling mass of murk, I was lucky to know the real river, the truest place to meet it, the only real point to connect with it's banks. The river was my right and responsibility as a descendent of the family line, I tried to impress this upon my sibling with my tree years worth of advanced study on the subject.

And seemingly suddenly, though really it must have been over years and months, months and years at a time, this cord was broken. New children were born, my father stopped going down south for Christmas, my grandmother seemed older than I remembered, tired in a way that frightened me. I became busy with my "real" life and though there was no particular or neat end to St. Louis as a child, when I go back now it all looks small by comparison, the city, the house in Creve Coeur, the church, even my mythic aunts and uncles. The picture over the wall and my grandmother seem fragile and a bit unknown now, faded and shrunken from their former childhood brilliances. I've still never been to midnight mass, though it's long since passed from my desires. Because I can't do it anymore, because it would expose what isn't and really never was and because only the not doing leaves at least some of the magic possible, somewhere. In the story of bones uncovered from under the alter across the street during a renovation, in the nostalgic stories told to me about my younger self, and in that river, still big and obscuring enough not to give away all the mystic secrets it once held.