Wormhole

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The Sparrow

The Sparrow

I came home for lunch one day this week and found this little guy on the front doorstep. He must have stunned himself, by flying into the storm door window. Anne was standing guard over him and had set up some food and water. The light from my camera’s range finder triggered his reaction. I think that he expected to be fed by me. Anne got a box and lid, scooped him up and then took him around back to be released back into the wild. I had to get back to work, but she emailed be the end of this story:

I found a nice shady spot at the edge of the ivy. I sort of tipped the bird out, and it immediately hopped on top of the ivy, then it hopped onto a day lily leaf. Then it flew up towards my shoulder, surprising me. But instead of landing on my shoulder, it kept on flying and flew over the peak of the garage. I couldn’t see where it landed, but it clearly had more chops at flying then it was showing on the porch. Glad the Alpha Predator is gone.

The Alpha Predator was a neighbor’s cat. The owner himself dubbed him that. He was the death of more than a few birds in our yard and I took every opportunity to scare it back home, across the street. That neighbor moved on and took the cat with him, where it is surely terrorizing its new neighborhood. I doubt this baby sparrow would have survived if that cat was still around.

The 23 Skidoo

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The Flatiron Building

The Flatiron Building

This post is basically a ping-back to a post that Raincharm made earlier this month. In that post Raincharm quoted Wikipedia for an explanation of the phrase, “23 skidoo”. Really all that I have to add here is a photograph of the NYC landmark, the Flatiron building, at the intersection of Broadway and 5th Avenue and 23rd Street, in Manhattan. Per Raincharm here is the Wiki story:

Perhaps the most widely known story of the origin of the expression concerns the area around the triangular-shaped Flatiron Building at Madison Square in New York City. The building is located on 23rd Street at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Broadway, and, due to the shape of the building, winds swirl around it. During the early 1900s, groups of men would allegedly gather to watch women walking by have their skirts blown up, revealing legs, which were seldom seen publicly at that time. Local constables, when telling such groups of men to leave the area, were said to be “giving them the 23 Skidoo”.

Again per Raincharm, Wiki goes on to elucidate:

It is at a triangular site where Broadway and Fifth Avenue—the two most important streets of New York—meet at Madison Square, and because of the juxtaposition of the streets and the park across the street, there was a wind-tunnel effect here. In the early twentieth century, men would hang out on the corner here on Twenty-third Street and watch the wind blowing women’s dresses up so that they could catch a little bit of ankle. This entered into popular culture and there are hundreds of postcards and illustrations of women with their dresses blowing up in front of the Flatiron Building. And it supposedly is where the slang expression “23 skidoo” comes from because the police would come and give the voyeurs the 23 skidoo to tell them to get out of the area.

We took this picture at 6 AM on a Sunday morning in late May, 2009. We were in NYC for a bicycle ride, naturally, the Five Boroughs Ride. We had left our Times Square hotel and were cruising down Broadway, on our way to Battery Park. This was in the city that never sleeps, but at that hour, it was certainly taking a rest. We cruised down Broadway, with nary a car moving on the street. The only traffic that we encountered on our way was the steadily growing bike traffic that we encountered as we headed south. I must say that this unexpected encounter with the Flatiron building was probably the high point of that ride. You see it started to rain shortly afterwards and rained for the rest of the day.

Undies In A Bunch

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Aeroshell and the Arch

Aeroshell and the Arch

I was first exposed to the phenomenon of Saint Louis parochialism the first year I moved here. At work, two senior Mac engineers were going at it. One was a native, while the other one was a transplant. I was new to town then and had my ears open to any advice on settling into this city. The problem here though, was that the advice offered wasn’t any good. The native engineer advised me not to go to Forest Park, because it wasn’t safe there. He also announced that he didn’t need to go up in the Arch, because he had seen it being built. The old transplant tried pushing back on this nativist propaganda, only to be dismissed as only a newcomer, to which he retorted, “But I’ve lived in Saint Louis for 34 years!”

Flash forward 33 years and I find myself in the shoes of that old transplant. We’ve raised two native sons of Saint Louis, who in turn have joined the ever-growing diaspora of former Saint Louis residents. We’ve worked our careers here and have plans to retire here. Saint Louis is my home and I considered myself a fully fledged Saint Louisan. I love this city and would be first to defend it from its detractors, but I still don’t have an acceptable answer to the question, “What high school did you go to?” I find the recent claim that Saint Louis is the most sinful city in America only worthy of derision. Sometimes though this sense of Saint Louis protectionism is over zealous. Such is the case over the recent umbrage being taken locally about what my former neighbor wrote.

The root of this tempest in a teapot was a June 8th New York Times opinion piece entitled, Loving the Midwest, by Curtis Sittenfeld. In her article, Ms. Sittenfeld first dishes on Saint Louis, but ultimately comes to love and then speaks her love for this town. It doesn’t take much though for some people to get their undies in a bunch. The article sparked immediate turmoil in the blog-o-sphere, along with letters to the editor. We only became aware of this mini controversy, after reading about it in this last Sunday’s Post-Dispatch. Really get to know St. Louis by Martin Daly took offense from some of Sittenfeld’s less than flattering observations about Saint Louis and its Saint Louisans.

As I said we were neighbors with the Sittenfelds. They were a quiet, relatively young couple who lived next to us during their first few years in Saint Louis. We would coo over their two young daughters, before they moved on. Reading her article, I was reminded of our own sense of loneliness, when we first moved here. Native Saint Louisans generally have their own rich lives, full of family and life long friends, with little room left over for newcomers. Our first friends were also transplants. We’ve been able to sustain friendship in Saint Louis through the vehicle of our hobby, bicycling. Still, neither Anne nor I can get more than a puzzled look, when we answer “Pioneer High School”, to that most stereotypical of Saint Louis questions.

Happy 60th Anniversary

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Horsey, Bugs, le Marquis and Pooh

Horsey, Bugs, le Marquis and Pooh

Today is Anne’s parents 60th anniversary. To help celebrate this event Anne and her sisters conspired together. Bubs and Harry had planned to go to dinner last light at a fancy new restaurant, Logan’s, in Ann Arbor. Jane delivered a giant, gorgeous bouquet of flowers to their house yesterday morning and then arranged for a bottle of wine to be delivered at dinner and also left instructions to put the tab on her credit card. She then jetted off to Paris. I imagine when she returns, she’ll be hitting up her two siblings for their share of this party.

The morning rain finally departed and we launched for a steamy late afternoon bike ride. We stopped for a late lunch / early dinner at a new to us restaurant, the Saint Louis Oasis. It is located on Euclid in the CWE, just north of the parkway, across the street from Central Table. Oasis features Greek and Mediterranean cuisine. I had their deluxe gyro and Anne had their stuffed grape leaves. The food was quite good. I thought that my gyro was better than the fare at either Olympia or Spiro’s. Maybe this isn’t too surprising since Oasis is just around the corner from the Greek Orthodox church, famous for its Greek food festival.