Trendy But Casual

Christmas, St Louis

 

Let me see … the temperature is in single digits (Fahrenheit), my nose is bleeding, and yesterday we sat for an hour and ten minutes in stopped traffic trying to get out of a shopping mall’s parking garage. We must be in St Louis.

St Louis, fan-shaped city of churches and supermarkets, beer and blight, two big rivers, numerous major highways,  and an excess of big malls and sports franchises. How I love your Nordstrom’s! How annoying is it that Highway 40 is closed right now? It’s quite complicated to get to the major retail cluster I know as the Axis of Evil on and around Brentwood (the Galleria, Crate & Barrel, Whole Foods, World Market, Borders, Target, and so on).

We’re staying downtown, which is sort of like Chicago without the rivers and stairs. The business district is trying to revive itself, apparently, from the torpor afflicting many American downtowns, so construction/renovation work is going on, despite the frigid cold, and buildings like the one we’re staying in – the former Board of Education, built in 1891 – are being converted to loft apartments.  Our loft apartment on the corner of Locust and Ninth overlooks a plaza-in-progress, poetically described by T. Middy as “concrete with trees.”

We stayed down here once before, Christmas 2000, in the Omni Hotel. We appeared to be the only guests. When a light bulb blew in our room, we called down to the desk: some breathless man in street clothes turned up forty minutes later brandishing the bulb, and we suspected he’d driven from home. It snowed that year, and the streets outside were white and silent.

It’s livelier down here these days, though lively is a relative term, especially now, with everything closing for Christmas. There’s a City Grocery around the corner. Yesterday we walked to Macy’s to look at the window displays, but it was too cold to linger, and Macy’s itself was quiet and a little dispiriting. Later we discovered that everyone in St Louis was at West County Mall, trying to get in and out of the parking lot, and crowding out the Apple store.

Apart from trying on shoes at Nordstrom, my favorite thing to do in St Louis – and note I’m opting for American spelling, because T. Middy tells me it’s my patriotic duty – is go to the movies. I especially like the Tivoli in University City, and the little cinemas at Plaza Frontenac mall. But I don’t think we’ll have time for movies this year. I’m cooking English Christmas dinner for the Middy family here in the loft, which means we drove up from Louisiana with a car full of pots, dishes, wrapped gifts, food, alcohol, a fake Christmas tree, outfits for every occasion, etc (“like the Clampetts,” according to TM). Today we have to pick up the turkey at the Smokehouse Market in Chesterfield, so I can begin slavishly following the diktats of Nigella (brining the turkey, making the giblet gravy, etc).

We’ve already been to Global Foods Market in Kirkwood, my favorite supermarket anywhere in the US. It’s a fantastic place for Asian produce and ingredients, as well as things like chestnut puree, caster sugar, golden syrup, and a dozen different sorts of orange marmalade. The only thing we weren’t able to get there was sponge cakes for the trifle: they’d had 20 dozen, the manager told us, but all had sold, so I’ll have to make my own. I’m not inflicting Christmas pudding on the Middy family this year. Like Marmite, it’s an acquired taste, I think, though they’ve been polite and plucky about it before – even the year we got carried away with the burning brandy, and had to beat out the blue flames dancing across my sister-in-law’s new kitchen table.

T. Middy is full of Christmas spirit, blasting Bing Crosby through the apartment, and saying things to me like “No, you cannot buy The Essential Toto,” and “How can you go on The Amazing Race when you can’t even get the cap off the shampoo bottle?” He hasn’t even thanked me for not forcing him to grate suet this year.

Hard to think I was still in New Zealand at the beginning of this month, and that we’ll be in Paris at the end of this week. The weeks in between were consumed with the following: Christmas cards, cooking, references, and our party. And finishing revisions on my YA novel, which comes out next year. And standing in line in the Post Office on Louisiana Avenue, which did not feel obliged to have more than two people working at any given time, despite the long queues, or to have a supply of overseas stamps (I had to use three different stamps on most cards to make up the required postage), or, in fact, to have enough of anything: on my last visit, a handwritten NO HOLIDAY STAMPS sign was stuck on the door.

And a few days after I mailed cards to the UK, we got a call from a woman in Staten Island, New York. The card I’d sent to my friend Bridgit in London had ended up at this unknown woman’s house in New York, even though the envelope had correct overseas postage, an airmail sticker, and an address that read London, UK with the right post code.  None of this information deterred the US Mail from delivering it to someone with the same street name in an outer borough of New York. Happy Christmas!

We have photos of our house looking tidy and over-decorated, but they’ll have to wait. The turkey must be collected before freezing rain starts falling. Also, listening to “Christmas in Killarney” is giving me a headache.

Last day

Today was my last at the Sargeson flat; I'm now a Former Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellow, no longer living among the birds in Albert Park. It was a frantic day, like all my moving days, involving manic cleaning (by T. Middy) and the proliferation of sheafs of paper, from receipts to photocopies to MS pages, all of which apparently needed to be stuffed into our luggage and dragged back across the Pacific. 

After five months of living in my home town, I'm very sad to be leaving Auckland. And the flat has been a haven, of sorts, despite the best effort of various assailants (drunkards, hooligans, club bouncers looking for a dawn party location, ants, mould, etc). I've packed in as much reading and writing as possible: completing two manuscripts and editing an anthology, among other things. While I was there, my fourth book came out and I turned 43 - not at the same time, but both quite unthinkable just a few years ago. I traveled to Sydney once, Wellington three times, and the US ... what was it, three times? Four? I voted in two elections. Every day I listened to the tui singing in the park.

This was the building, and the upstairs window where I sat working every day:

Behind the building is the Sky Tower, the tallest building in the Southern hemisphere, according to T. Middy. Downstairs is the art gallery that only ever showed one or two things, like a pile of hand-made bricks, or a tall stick. This is the staircase to my front door, compared by my brother, with only slight exaggeration, to the famous stairs in 'Kidnapped'. This was my desk, early on in the residency, before it got messy and I bought a nicer mug.

I'm in my second home, the Koru Club, right now, waiting to fly out, having spent the last of my NZ cash-in-hand on reflexology. (This is why I don't own a house: I take the Jack-and-the-Beanstalk magic-beans approach to spending money.) 

Once I'm back in New Orleans, I have revisions to complete on one MS right away, to make the deadline, and some work to do to prepare for next semester. There are also c. 250 student references to write, all of which seem to be due tomorrow. And Christmas is waiting to pounce, of course. We need to get a tree, organize our party, get presents for the US contingent, mail cards, drive to St Louis, etc. Only then will we get to escape to Paris, where I've promised to Do No Work ... 

But this morning, at Pilates, I smelled the pine needles of the Christmas tree set up in the corner, and I thought: Christmas, to me, really takes place in the early summertime; it smells of pine, and fruit mincemeat, and the coldest thing on Christmas Day is the ice cream we eat with the Christmas pudding. Today my niece put on a Bing Crosby album, so we could determine exactly how many Christmas songs he recorded (answer: 75 plus), and we sang along. 

But white Christmases are over-rated, I think, however picturesque they promise to be. I'd much rather be home, curtains drawn to keep the glare of the sun off the TV. With my family, because however annoying your own family may be, they're still your own annoying family. I have lots more pictures to post of our adventures this year, and will post more frequently in the next few weeks. Maybe "The T. Middy 2008 Photo Album"? He is elusive, TM, but occasionally captured on film.