It costs $15 to get in and experience "THE GLOW" and I haven't made time, but it is free to stay out and snap pictures through the fence...and I am half-a-block away.
So, is this the bum's view or an advantage of being a neighbor?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------A couple weeks ago, I was riding my bike on a dark and busy Tower Grove Avenue during early evening rush hour traffic.
I noticed the blue tree out of the corner of my eye to my right, but just then, there was a commotion to my left. Someone had hit a cat and it was scrambling frantically to get to its feet and get out of the street, but its spine was corkscrewing the paws weren't gaining ground. I jumped the curb and stopped on the sidewalk to watch.
Cars were slamming on their brakes.
The first, to avoid the cat, and a few after that, to avoid that stopped car. Then, a school bus came roaring up behind them and nearly rear-ended the stopped line of cars. The bus quickly swerved into the bike lane, where luckily, no bikes were traveling and no cars were parked.
I went back later to take a picture of this blue tree, but they had shut down the lights for the night. I looked across the street and the cat was there.
Lights out.
Against the curb.
The next morning when I biked past, the cat was gone.
This Wednesday afternoon, I dropped what I was doing to go pick something up at the library.
I got my bike out of my apartment and noticed that the sky was in that "magic hour". I forgot to bring a camera, but rode through Tower Grove Park slowly to take it all in. The oddly warm, December air. The light through the bare branches.
I have seen this before.
One afternoon, I was dismounting at the library and took these through a butterfly sculpture near Southwest and Kingshighway.
By the time, I left the library, the "magic hour" was gone.
I rode through some alleys and cut East on Shaw and then South on Tower Grove where the traffic was urgent. The stops and starts of the end of this fucking humpday workday were annoying to the commuters. Again, to my right, the lights were glimmering as I passed slowly; as they appeared through the grates and between sections of stone wall. Eerily, bell music and some other kind of music sounded, but was barely perceptible over the rush of the hour past my left shoulder.
I dumped off my books and a DVD, swapped shirts and rode out for a few pints.
Later, I returned to the blue tree with a pleasant buzz, a camera and a friend. It was a December, 2015 version of the knothole gang.
What?
What is the moral of this story?
One man's magic hour is another man's rush hour, or something.
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