The author looks across the boat lake in Carondelet Park to the place where Aunt Edith stood with him 65 years ago. [Photo by his friend, Jeff]

ALAN writes:

Carondelet Park is a large park in south St. Louis. It has two lakes, many hills, and winding paths for walking or bicycling. For me, it is also a park of many memories. I go there often to visit some of the higher animals (as Twain might have worded it): Ducks, geese, cranes, bluebirds, cardinals, red-winged blackbirds, butterflies, rabbits, squirrels, and woodchucks.  It is a temporary refuge from the preposterous idiocies of the lower animals in the city around it.  A bench in a quiet setting in the park is an excellent place to sit, think, and remember.

I am always alone when I go to the park, except for the ghosts who accompany me everywhere. One morning the melody and words of Duke Ellington’s 1934 “Solitude” occurred to me unexpectedly as I sat on a bench overlooking one of the lakes. That was fitting but odd, because I had not listened to the song since the mid-1980s when it was played on some St. Louis radio station featuring Big Band music.

In years long past, passenger trains came through the park. Many school picnics and band concerts were held there. A hundred years ago, boys liked to go fishing and swimming in one of the park’s lakes, until they were run off by “Big Bad Bill”, the park-keeper.

St. Louis newspaperman Jim Fox recalled how he and his wife and friends pulled their children in coaster wagons to the park in the 1950s, where they rode down the hills.

One day in 1984 I was reading a newspaper when a photograph caught my eye. I clipped and saved it because it showed a six-year-old boy feeding a group of ducks while he lay on his stomach on the walkway around the boat lake in Carondelet Park.  It reminded me instantly of days in the mid-1950s when my father took me to Benton Park, where we walked around the lakes and over a bridge during our Saturday afternoon outings.  Ordinary hours, it seemed to me then. Golden hours, it seems to me now.

On some days I sit on park benches and talk to my father.  He died nineteen years ago, but I talk to him anyway in the never-ending monologue in my head.  I know he would understand the things I say and why I say them.

Some days at the park have been picture perfect. Nature makes them that way with a sea of green, a blue dome overhead, warm sunshine, the songs of birds, and refreshing breezes by the boat lake. They are precisely the kinds of days my father most enjoyed. Many people take such days for granted. But he didn’t. There were many such days in his life and he never failed to see them and appreciate them. What do I mean by this? I mean the next time such a day occurs in your life, imagine you are seeing it for the first time—or the last.

The park is closed to most traffic for the duration. One morning as I walked along a roadway, I encountered a creature crawling toward me on the road just below the curb.  To my astonishment, it was a turtle, the only turtle I have ever seen in the park. I offered him a stale cracker, but he thought it over until I walked away.

In 1964 I fed a pair of chipmunks at Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado. Today I feed the songbirds, ducks, geese, and squirrels in Carondelet Park.  Their conversation is more sensible than the chattering of homo saps walking by.

On another day I walked to a quiet stretch of road near the northeast corner of the park and found myself back in the year 1960.  It was across from a building that was then a police station.  The police are long gone, but that roadway occupies a place in my memory. On some days in the spring of 1960, my uncle would come to our house to have supper with us and then he would drive us to that exact location in the park. It was there, in his blue mid-1950s model Ford, that he coached my mother as she practiced her driving and parallel parking.  Those early-evening hours are etched in my memory because I always sat in the back seat, where I made the common childhood mistake of taking such people and such days for granted.

The street bordering Carondelet Park on the west is Leona Street. It is therefore a perpetual reminder of my beloved Aunt Leona, who was born 115 years ago, treated me supremely well when I was a boy, and enjoyed hearing the songbirds in the trees around her home.

The Lyle Mansion stands in the southern portion of Carondelet Park.  It was there before the park became a park.  It is a two-story white-frame house that was built circa 1842. It has 28 tall windows with black shutters. No one has lived there for decades, but the house gleamed on the day in 1979 when the Carondelet Historical Society held a ceremony on its front porch to present a plaque designating it as one of the historic houses in that neighborhood.  A hundred years ago, you could sit on that front porch and look down the hill to a deer paddock.

It gleamed in 2005 when I walked around the house and took pictures. For half a century, groups of older men met there regularly to play cards in the Carondelet Park Pinochle Club.

But today the Lyle Mansion does not sparkle. It has been neglected and could benefit from repairs and several coats of paint. And I fear all the members of the Pinochle Club are now dead.

I walked a short distance from that house to a wooded area with a carpet of needles and pine cones. Years ago, shortly after my mother died, I stood there on that carpet….thinking, remembering, regretting.  The setting prompted me to remember the song “In the Pines,” recorded by actor Pernell Roberts in 1962.

Some park benches bear the names of citizens of Carondelet.  One day several years ago, I sat on a bench overlooking the boat lake. It bears a small plaque reading:  “In Memory of Ernie Winkelmann.  Ice Skater, Sled Rider, Bicyclist.  Enjoyed This Park His Entire Life”.  The bench is one block from where he lived.  He was also a charter member of the Carondelet Historical Society in 1967.  In the 1950s my classmates and I bought candy and baseball cards in Winkelmann’s Drug Store.

One day in or about 1955, my father took me to visit Uncle John and Aunt Edith.  We got in their machine and rode to Carondelet Park, where we took six black-and-white snapshots.  One of them shows Aunt Edith and me standing by the boat lake.  Another shows us sitting on a park bench as they enjoy ice cream treats and I work on my snow cone.

Not until many years later, after all of them had died, did I discover that Ernie Winkelmann and my aunt and uncle lived on the same street only a few blocks apart.

As did I, John and Edith grew up in the old America.  They liked living in the old America.  They enjoyed traveling through it.  How long ago was that?  It was so long ago that Detroit was a clean, productive, and civilized city.  In 1940, a friend sent them a postcard “souvenir of Detroit” featuring 20 postcard scenes of “Detroit, a City of Beauty and Interest” where you could visit 17 automobile plants.

They travelled through 48 States and collected colorful State decals that Aunt Edith displayed under the glass covering her kitchen table.  For a penny, they mailed a postcard from Houston to my paternal grandmother in St. Louis in 1941.

Aunt Edith had fond memories of walking to neighborhood movie houses and watching movies featuring George Raft.  When she was a girl, she was something of a tomboy.  One day she climbed up a telephone pole, but then couldn’t figure out how to get down.  Somebody called the fire department to get her down.  She never did that again.

On the day of my father’s funeral, Edith and I rode past a location that had once been the Edgewater Club, a popular dining destination atop a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River.  She told me she and Uncle John had gone there many times and always enjoyed it.  Thirty years later, it became the Edgewater Nursing Home where my maternal grandfather died in 1969.

How kind they were to me, but how little I knew them. John worked for Anheuser-Busch and Edith worked in a neighborhood bakery.  They had no children. And so it is that I talk to them, too, while seated on my park bench and apologize to them for all the wasted years and wasted opportunities to have known them better. My error; my most grievous error.

One morning the weather was perfect as I walked to the boat lake. As I sat on a bench, I was joined by George M. Cohan and Nora Bayes.  In a time of tyranny called “lockdown”, I desperately needed a reminder of pre-despair America.  They provided it:  “Over There” played in my head.  Now, younger readers would take that to mean I listened to it on some trendy gadget or device I carried with me.  Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.  How naive and concrete-bound they are.  Older readers will know what I mean.  Cohan wrote it and she recorded it in 1917. It is, as Lawrence Auster wrote in 2008, a song from pre-despair America, a wonderful song that projects confidence and uplift, qualities utterly lacking in much of modern life.  [“Over There”, View from the Right, June 28, 2008]

You could sit for days in the park and not see a woman wearing a dress instead of pants. But I got lucky: Late one afternoon in May, I saw a young woman pushing a baby stroller down a path near the boat house to the walkway around the lake. A little girl, about three, was trotting along in front of them.  They walked leisurely around the lake. As they came closer to the hill where I was seated on a bench, I could see that the woman was wearing an ankle-length dress with vertical orange, brown, and white stripes. The little girl was wearing a blue blouse and pink skirt.  The other child appeared to be a boy, less than two years old. Both were blond. Their walk around the lake was interrupted only when the little girl discovered a park bench along their path and promptly climbed up on it. She found enough novelty in that to last for about thirty seconds. Then they continued on their way and walked up a staircase by the boat house, the same staircase where Aunt Edith and I posed for a snapshot in 1955. They made no noise, created no spectacle, and minded their own business.

When I went to the park earlier that day, my frame of mind was not especially good.  It is seldom good in an age of increasing lies and ugliness, and even less so in a time of tyranny perpetrated in the name of health.  But the tableau described above was a most unexpected and welcome exception to all of that. I sat there and watched it unfold. It was wonderful.  It was the kind of scene that restores one’s confidence–not in the human race or the American people, but in life and in some human beings. It was the kind of scene that was once ordinary in American life but is now extraordinary — because decent, uplifting, reassuring, and therefore at odds with the modern zeitgeist. And if you don’t understand why it was all those things, then you are an idiot.

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