Arches

Happy Birthday, Gateway symbol! 40 years and still standing, my my. Undeniably St. Louis is made that much more interesting by this monument. And I realize the Mississippi River is notorious for its muddy waters, but I felt inclined to indicate a fair sky reflection instead.*I just returned from a pretty serious run of errands over my lunch hour. To begin with, my former banking center on Peachtree Dunwoody Road has closed its doors. Previously unaware of this fact, I inched along P-D Road with the breath of gas left in my tank I've been coasting on for days, pulled into the plaza sprawl, rolled into a parking spot, jumped from my car clutching a check I really wanted with a lot of my bones to deposit, and stopped in my tracks to see a piece of plywood where an automated teller machine used to be. To the right of that, an 8.5x11 piece of paper telling me that that location no longer operates. So, I'm thinking, this is fine, I will sniff out another nearby location. Not entirely familiar with the area, other than the 4 streets I take to get to and from my jobsite, I traveled to Roswell Road, pumped a little fuel into the vehicle, and headed (fingers crossed, hopefully) toward a banking center. Traffic around here never ceases. Not never ceases to amaze me, simply, never ceases. It can be an hour or two past lunch rush and cars still flood streets, main thoroughfares, side roads, parking lots, and the like. Searching for something you need in an unfamiliar area adds an extra element of danger to an already-hazardous adventure, the latter being, just, driving in Atlanta. Anyway, as luck would have it, my intuition led me correctly and I found a banking center. Stopped, took care of the deposit. Meanwhile, back on Roswell Road, traffic still buzzed all around. I re-entered the instability of it, minding my own, feeling accomplished for having deposited that money, speedometer reading in the 40-45 range, and ahead, spied one of those ghastly huge vehicles, one of the ones just too big to fully absorb in one's whole line of vision, veering to its left across my forthcoming path into a gas station on my right. Considering myself fine at my speed, I proceeded forward. Seconds later, the tail end of the large monster vehicle disappeared to reveal a smaller compact car's rear larger than life exactly in my windshield! Alas, my foot smashed the brake pedal into the floor (other foot pushed against the clutch, seeing as, like an idiot I drive a manual transmission in this apocalyptic traffic) and with all the sounds you might imagine, the grinding, the screeching, the groan of locked tires gliding across the pavement, I near-missed slamming my front headlong into this car's back. For someone as myself as lucky as I've been all the years I've driven, you'd think I'd drive with a little more caution, a little more consideration for others. Yet, I can't seem to locate that pocket in my brain which contains all the patience one must possess to drive calmly in Atlanta. Anyway, I'm fortunate today. The remainder of my errands were run in silence: radio off, brain waves shut down to a minimal level needed to finish driving myself back to work. I just finished eating a sandwich and barely tasted a moment of it because my head is still reeling from the thought of my face crushed in the depths of my driver's side airbag. I barely remember stopping at the Post Office, pumping dimes into the stamp machine, stamping the Halloween cards Craig and I lovingly prepared last night for his nieces and my nephew. I'm just beginning to feel normal again.*Speaking of Halloween, loosely, anyway, last night Craig and I branched out from our regular seasonal tv-viewing and carved pumpkins for our patio. Craig carved the Chicago White Sox symbol, this year's World Champions, duly note, and I opted, obviously, for the Cards' STL logo. Initially we had talked of IU and Purdue pumpkins, however, the Boilermakers are not making Craig proud this year in their college football efforts. So, we went with the you can't script October baseball theme. Now, I only recently began this on line approach to journaling, so it doesn't come as a surprise that I've yet to mention Craig's artistic abilities. Last night presented me with the perfect opportunity to quietly be in awe of Craig and his hidden talents. It kicked off with the pumpkin carving; his wound up looking really excellent with the candle lit in its belly--my STL logo, however, fairly well failed seeing as I didn't leave enough support here, or I sliced the pumpkin too thin there, or whatever. Not only did Craig salvage my pumpkin in all of his latent artistic glory, but he then went on to create, in black pen, a whole world of Halloween characters in the blank spaces of his oldest niece's greeting card. In this respect Craig reminds me of my father. When I was in church as a little girl, my dad used to sketch little objects in the church bulletin margins to keep me still and behaved. And he was quite the sketch artist, my dad! I note this about people who sketch from their minds: these people are not only skilled with the pen, but they are also inventive and imaginative in their heads. Last night Craig sat concentrating hunched over this card, and periodically would look up and proudly display to me his latest Halloween creation. Granted, drawing bats and full moons and ghosts and silhouettes of witches riding through the sky on brooms might not seem amazing to some, but to me, coming from the heart and mind and pen of a boy who calculates construction dimensions for a living, et al., it's awfully special. It's adorable that his ghost had puppy paws to inadvertently lessen the blow of ghosts being spooky things, and it is in the interest of attention to detail to point out that he even drew stitched patches on the jacket of his Frankenstein.*So to attempt to regain any artistic composure I may have lost last night in my inabilities to carve pumpkins, I constructed the above simplistic St. Louis skyline, note: not to scale. It also represents the next pumpkin project Craig will allow me, he told me last night: I will be sticking to "common shapes."