Gateway Arch

...a travelogue from Mary...The Gateway Arch is enormous, a gleaming silver that reflects and soars into the blue sky. Its feet are large and firmly planted in the ground, but the top seems to lightly float in the sky even as it melts into it. After doffing our graduation garb, Anna and I entered nomadic lives, and we thought that the Gateway Arch would be a meaningful place to begin our post-graduate journey. We are at once both strongly supported by our families and dear friends and soaring (sputtering?) into a future that, like the sky, seems very large and ambiguous.
We drove through Missouri and a lot of Kansas today, listening to Simon and Garfunkel, eating raisins, and reading Nelson Mandela's autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. Nelson's only about 23 years old right now, so he and we both have a long ways to go yet. Missouri had lots of hills, farms, and large swathes of trees. It's lovely to drive through such openness. I can feel my soul relaxing like the Mississippi River spreading into a floodplain. Having spent the past four years in the Midwest, however, we're resisting its charms and charging on through towards Aspen. Right now we're in the bathroom of a KOA campsite in western Kansas, because there's an electrical outlet in here.

Yesterday we drove from Wheaton to St. Louis. We had a little bit of a problem leaving: namely, a tire. When I got the tires changed on the lovely car my Great Uncle Frank gave me, I asked them to give me the best old one for a spare. But then I discovered where the car was already hiding a spare, and, besides, the other one was entirely useless, because for some reason they'd given me the part of the tire you make tire swings from. Maybe some of you reading this would know what to do with it, but I personally have no idea how to turn a tire swing into a wheel. It's not environmentally friendly, nor probably legal, to just toss a tire swing. I thought about leaving it by the Wade Center dumpster, but that would not have been right. So we headed off, Anna and I, in our tank tops and sunglasses, with a full car and the tire part of a tire swing. We pulled into a car repair place on Roosevelt, and I asked a young man if I could drop it off. He checked with his boss, who said, "No." I looked as much as I could like a naive maiden in distress, who had thought the nice automobile men would take care of everything. (OK, I didn't have to fake it at all. What on earth were we going to do with a tire sitting in our back seat all the way to Seattle?) The nice young man looked troubled at my predicament, took it, said, "All right, you're fine," and disappeared around the back of the garage.

We got to the church in time for me to take a long nap in the park across the street, while Anna played with her new camera and took pictures of people taking pictures before prom. We were both so glad to be at Grace and Chris's wedding, and to see our dear friend Michelle Heinze. At the reception, we sat with some friendly people from the area. I asked them what a particularly St. Louis thing to do would be. Drew said there was a drag strip outside the city, if we were interested, and the other guy suggested sniping, or else shooting the raccoon that had been raiding his bird feeder. It is illegal to kill snipes, now, because so many people wanted to call themselves snipe shots, so groups of people go out into the woods and night, catch snipes in bags, and then release them again.
We stayed at Anna Moffat's house with some other Wheaties last night. On the way out from the reception, we asked if they wanted to go out. Anna Moffat was like, "Ummm....do you mean like Steak and Shake, or the other kind of out?" Well...

Dear parents: Please don't worry about us. The police have got us covered.