"ISN'T IT BORING?"

Four ladies in the vicinity of “a certain age” recently met up after more than a few decades at Mac’s Time Out Lounge in downtown Alton. Too late for lunch, too early for cocktail hour; and Mac’s is not known for its afternoon teas. It’s a sports bar where folks gather to watch (and bet on) the Kentucky Derby and down brews like Boulevard, Blue Moon and Schlafly’s Hefewizen in a sheltered beer garden. You’re likely to see someone you know if you’re from Alton. It isn’t Cheers, but it’s cozy.

The four ladies were from Alton once upon a time, but all had moved away ages ago. One had recently returned. That would be me, who suggested Mac’s, a local institution now but not around when we were growing up. One childhood friend, transplanted to Colorado Springs, was in town for 36 hours visiting family. The second has retired in St. Charles, a St. Louis suburb across the river. The fourth lives near Springfield, the Illinois state capital, in Jacksonville (pop. 19,445).

They accosted me with the same question friends in New York, Miami and Paris ask: Isn’t it boring here? Not at all. This blog was derailed last summer not because there was nothing to write about, but because there was too much to do. Who had time for reflection?

Even friends and family here were surprised at how crowded my calendar has become in a town of 27,781, not counting the 17,982 souls who live in the Alton “suburb” of Godfrey. But rather than returning home, I arrived as a tourist, looking through new eyes. It has been amazing. I tend to gush when I try to explain. 

But what happens when I no longer feel like a tourist?

WHAT'S TO EAT?

This isn't the first time I've transplanted myself from a world capital to a small town in the Midwest. I once moved from Paris (France, not Texas) to Columbia, MO. My mother-in-law, an eastern-seaboard type who loved visiting us in Paris, shook her head and ask, "But what will you eat there?" She had a point. But that was before the culinary world grew flat, and the Internet delivered most anything to the door most anywhere.

While I have had to spell chut-ney to a Walmart clerk who thought maybe we could find it in the jam aisle, I am not going without much since my move. If desperate for something like Irish butter, I can drive 40 minutes to St. Louis where Whole Foods and Trader Joe's are within a couple of blocks of each other.

Staples of my kitchen like hummus, feta, arugula, sun-dried tomatoes, smoked salmon, pita, Cholula hot sauce, Kikkoman soy sauce and fresh ginger are on the shelves of the local Schnuck's,  a family-owned grocery chain founded just across the river in north St. Louis in 1939. But I can't find Kavli crispbread that I used to buy at Fairway in New York City and Quik-Chek in Miami or Genova solid light tuna in olive oil that I found at Costco in Miami and New York and also Fairway.  Worse, I have found no acceptable substitutes here.

So last weekend I flew to Manhattan to grocery shop. That makes for some pricey crispbread and tuna fish salad. When I got back, I went on line and found a new grocer -- Amazon.

I can get the crispbreads in a pack of 12 for $22.51 and the tuna -- which turns out to be a Chicken of the Sea product -- in a pack of 24 for $50.34. No shipping charges because my student status at the local junior college made me eligible for Prime shipping. It ends up being considerably cheaper per item than what I've paid in brick-and-mortar stores.

But I'm still giving Schnuck's a chance to keep me as a customer. Paul, the co-manager, is checking into availability after I dropped off an empty tuna can and a crispbread box. No need to stockpile if I can buy locally.

MIDWEST CULTURE SHOCK

When I lived in Manhattan, I thought I was at the center of the cultural universe. So did everyone else I know. But the cultural center moved west with me. I could be out and about almost every night -- and that's without crossing the bridge to St. Louis.

Tonight, I face a quandary. On my calendar is a free Dixieland concert outdoors at the World Tallest Man Statue in Upper Alton. But each Wednesday I've been promising myself to stop by Jazz on Broadway to hear Gigi Darr and Ralph Butler, no cover charge. My upstairs neighbor Linda Miller just invited me to join her at the St. Louis Botanical Garden to hear Miss Jubilee and the Humdingers play on the lawn.


I'm opting for Gigi and Ralph and not just because Gigi is my new piano teacher. I already have two outdoor concerts on the books this week -- tomorrow night's band concert in my neighborhood park and Saturday the Alton Symphony Orchestra plays "In Harmony with Nature" at The Nature Institute on the bluffs. The 50-year-old Alton Symphony, by the way, is considered one of the premier community orchestras in the Midwest. Take that New York Philharmonic and your Great Lawn concerts.

TRIVIA FOR LIBRARY LOVERS

Around New York City, all the public libraries of a certain age like St. Agnes in my old neighborhood tend to look alike and no wonder. In 1901, the year he retired, Andrew Carnegie gave $5.2 million to the city to build dozens of branch libraries to bring books to the people. That same spring Alton in Southern Illinois became one of the few cities in the country to turn down his largesse, because of strings attached. A Carnegie library would require yearly taxation. Alton had had a free library since 1852 thanks to some civic-minded ladies and a grieving widower.

It was the ladies who really got the library off the ground in 1866 when they bought the original Alton Library Association at auction, having raised enough money to pay off the library’s $165 debt and buy $300 worth of new books. Believing it was the library’s mission to contribute to the city’s social and intellectual life, they invited speakers like Ralph Waldo Emerson to the river city. The library thrived. By 1888, it had outgrown its corner room in the City Hall.

When Jennie D. Hayner, a Library Association director, died that year, her husband John decided to underwrite a library building in her memory. Hayner, who had come to Alton in 1848 from upstate New York, was no Carnegie, but he had prospered, moving up from cashier to stockholder in the First National Bank. He commissioned Theodore Link, later one of the architects of the St. Louis World’s Fair, to design a redbrick building with a modest tower. It was completed a decade before Carnegie decided to fund libraries. The German-born Link liked turrets and towers, which he incorporated into his designs for the Monticello Seminary in nearby Godfrey in 1889 and Union Station in St. Louis in 1894.

The library did seem like a castle to me when I was growing up. In grade school, I could walk down Christian Hill to the corner of 4th and State and enter the children’s library through the lower door. I worked my way through the biographies, learning about Sibelius before I ever heard his music, and children’s novels with gutsy female heroines. Being a visiting nurse captivated me until I read The Silver Pencil and knew I wanted to be a writer as well as a reader.

I don’t remember when I first was allowed to creep up the backstairs to check out books in the adult library, but I do remember the first book borrowed – The Good Earth by Pearl Buck, which was decidedly racier than the visiting nurse novels. That’s what I told Ms Buck when I interviewed her decades later for the Miami Herald. She wasn’t impressed.

It was in the arched interior of the Hayner library that I learned the Dewey Decimal System to find books on the id and super ego and researched Francisco de Miranda, a dashing Venezuelan who fought in the French Revolution and romanced Catherine the Great. Wherever my curiosity led, the library provided answers.

I hesitate to go back to that temple of my childhood, now housing genealogy and local history, but I already have my card to the main library in a storefront down the block. The quarterly newsletter just arrived, alerting me to new books. Was it a sign that near the top of the list was Fergus Bordewich's The Great American Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas and the Compromise That Preserved the Union? When I see Fergus next week at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism reunion, I will remind him that Douglas and Lincoln had a go at it right here in Alton in the 1858 Senate race, which Lincoln lost.

But now to the Hayner Library website. I just got an email alerting me that an e-copy of Massie’s Catherine the Great is ready to download to my Kindle. Maybe de Miranda is mentioned.

TRUCKS DON'T GO TO THE MIDWEST

That sporty little Honda my son Nicholas is passing on to me still sits in the front yard in Key Biscayne, FL, waiting pick up by an auto transport. It's stranded because two different brokers have tried to find it a ride to Illinois for three weeks and failed. In this cut-throat business, the second broker lured me away from the first by saying he had a driver in the area who would pick up the car last Monday, Tuesday at the latest. It's now Thursday at the latest, and Tyler just cut me off while I was holding on my daily call. He was quick enough to charge my AmX card with a $150 deposit a week ago today. Now I'm waiting to hear from the 1-Shot Express customer service man, who rather than put me on hold while dealing with another client, promised to call me back in 15-20 minutes. That was two hours ago.

Okay, so maybe it's the Snowbird Effect when it comes to moving cars north and south. Maybe there aren't any free spots as winter residents and tourists head home. But might there be if I were shipping from Miami to New York instead of into the Heartland?

That's a north/south question, but then there's my piano and boxes and boxes of my earthly possessions that were picked up two weeks ago tomorrow with delivery promised last week. Where are they on their westward journey? In a Moving Man warehouse up on 135th Street in Manhattan. Or so I hope. Brendon says no trucks headed this way by next Thursday when I'm headed back to NYC on business. Maybe after May 1, he ventures. It's been a rough moving season, he explains on my umpteenth call.

You're telling me! I had to go out yesterday and buy six pairs of shoes or go barefoot in Manhattan. On the bright side, it was an incredible sale at Von Maur, a family-owned department store founded by German immigrants in Davenport, Iowa, in 1872 and recently expanded an hour away from me near St. Louis. Ah, not just another Macy's.

PIONEER? NOT ME

I’d like to cast myself as a trendsetter, out there ahead of the curve, but I’m not the first down this path. Since buying the Alton apartment, I keep running into people who have come back after spending most of their adult years in places like Tahoe, Virginia Beach and – yes – New York City. For Penny Schmidt, whose father had been an art professor at Principia College 10 miles upriver, the impetus was 9/11. She shuttered her art gallery in mid-town Manhattan, encountering the same disbelief from her friends as I did mine, and sought sanctuary in Alton. In no time at all, she was a partner in the development of Mississippi Landing, Soho-style lofts in an early 20th century building with 12-foot ceilings, exposed brick and incredible river views.

When I interviewed her in 2007 for a New York Times story -- Residential Conversions Revitalize River Town, I was tempted to follow her lead. The sale of my Lincoln Towers studio apartment might have even bought me two luxury lofts! But once the article was completed, I went on to the next assignment, this one in Panama, and imaged what it would be like to live in one of those lovely old Canal Zone houses.

GOING HOME IT ISN'T

“Ah, you are going home,” nod my friends as though that could be the only explanation for trading New York after so many years for some unheard of destination west of the Hudson. But going home it isn’t. There’s nothing nostalgic about this decision to move to the historic Illinois river town where I grew up, no yearning for old comforts. If anything, it is a leap into the unknown, as much an adventure as anything else I’ve ever done. The leap surprised me as much as it did my friends. All I planned to do that January Sunday was a little recreational real estate shopping with my sister and niece, checking out an open house at Loretto Towers, a 19th century Catholic orphanage turned condo in the early 70s. For nearly a half-century in-between, the Sisters of the Precious Blood had operated a Girls' Home for unmarried "working girls" like my sixth-grade teacher Miss Christian. I had always wanted to see inside, but live there? Hardly.