Growth

The Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts under construction in 2009.

I grew up in Kansas City.  Though I never had a home address outside of Overland Park, Kan., I really am from Kansas City–anyone who’s lived in the metro knows what I mean.  As a kid, my dad worked at Hallmark, in the shadow of the Western Auto/Coke building.  Every Christmas, my brothers and I had our picture taken on the Crown Center Santa’s lap.  I remember livestock at the American Royal, the Harlem Globetrotters under the white steel tubing of Kemper Arena, running around the Shuttlecocks at the Nelson-Atkins Museum.  All of these memories were built with my mom and dad and my brothers, Tim and Andy.

A little bit older, and my dad moved into an office in 1 Kansas City Place, the tallest building in our skyline.  I had school dances at Starlight and Union Station, and an internship at the base of the Liberty Memorial, at the National World War I Museum.  My first beer was a Boulevard Wheat.  My brother’s wedding reception was held in Kauffman Stadium.  I wrote for the website of the Kansas City Museum, listened to jazz at the Blue Room with my best friend.  Simply put, KC is in my blood.

In the past few years, though, while I’ve been off living in Des Moines, Kansas City has begun to change.  You can see it in the buildings–the landmarks of my childhood are beginning to shape shift.  The classic limestone of the Nelson has been joined by glowing white cubes, growing from the lawn.  Kemper is now a has-been, with the Sprint Center marking downtown’s renewal.  Last spring, I saw steel girders create the seashell form of the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, the new anchor to the southwest corner of the skyline.

As I watched the cranes swing beams, I realized that just as my city changed without me, I changed without it.  My time at Drake University was, more than anything, what pushed me closer to being an adult.  Four long years of all kinds of growth, upwards and inwards and outwards all at once, had passed with barely any time in KC, any time with my family.  I knew they were there, though–my anchors–as I changed.

But just as I see myself and my city change, so I see us stay the same.  The brick and stone wonders that graced my chunk of Midwestern sky since long before my birth are still there: the KCP&L tower, the President Hotel, the KC Star building, and City Hall are all still major parts of my city.  The buildings, though, are only the most visible signs of what makes the changes and the constants of Kansas City important.  The true picture of myself and my Kansas City, from 22 years ago to today, is this.

Historical Significance

An American flag flies over a firehouse in the Charlestown neighborhood of Boston.

The Bunker Hill Monument is a granite obelisk with a great view of Boston.  At least, that’s what I’m told.  By the time my girlfriend, Laura, and I had reached the base of the tower’s 294 steps, we wanted nothing to do with it.  Instead, we sat on a bench and watched a busload of school children disappear into the stone doorway.  That cinched it for us; we thought we had ditched the rowdy bunch at Paul Revere’s house but they caught back up to us by Old North Church.  Here they were, beginning their climb as we sat down at the conclusion of our own journey.

That morning, Laura and I began the day with butterscotch scones from The Buttery, an excellent café in the South End neighborhood, just down the street from the Cathedral of the Holy Cross.  We walked from there to Boston Common and began our trek on the Freedom Trail.  For someone as obsessed with history and all things ‘Merican as I am, the Freedom Trail was a holy pilgrimage.  King’s Chapel, the Old State House, Old South Meeting House, the site of the Boston Massacre, Faneuil Hall, Revere’s house, and Old North Church were each as breathtaking as the last.  Somehow, I retain a 5-year-old’s sense of wonder at these things: “This is where it happened!” I’ll think, grinning like an idiot and whispering “Well, shit!”

By the time we crossed the Charles River over the Leonard Zakim/Bunker Hill Bridge, Laura’s and my legs were Jell-o, but we stood at the bottom of the trail’s last stretch.  We marveled at Charlestown’s colorful colonial architecture as we began to climb the neighborhood’s narrow streets.  The Freedom Trail’s path to the Bunker Hill Monument is steep and winding, but it paid its first dividend midway to the top.  There, we encountered Boston’s oldest firehouse, home to Engine 50 (plus T-shirts and bottled water—we bought both), and chatted with a friendly group of firefighters under a bright and fluttering American flag.  The colors waved as we continued our hike with a breeze at our backs.

When we reached the top of Bunker Hill, we looked out over old roofs, over Boston, and over the harbor.  We spotted the golden dome of the Statehouse, the white spire of Old North Church, and the stunted masts of the USS Constitution.  We bought ice cream from a man in a dented van, then rehashed the history of the Battle of Bunker Hill, thanks to a plaque on the base of the Colonel William Prescott statue.  Then, we sat at the obelisk’s foot.  The school children ran around the base, shouting and playing soldier, until their chaperones herded them into the tower’s stairwell.  “There’s no way they appreciate what this is all about,” Laura said.

“No,” I said, “but someday they will.”

Ashes

Bodies twist in a sculpture at the Dachau concentration camp

We had fun.

We arrived in the evening, met up with a very close friend, and drank too much beer.  We wandered around the center of Munich, my brother arguing with a Turkish man in a gyro shop, Alex and I talking Obama with a woman from Kansas we met outside the Rathaus.  In the morning, we passed a man playing music in the street for money–not guitar or trumpet like a normal busker, but a cello.  Germany is wonderful, I thought.

We boarded the train to the suburbs with jokes about what my brother didn’t remember, but as we neared Dachau, our voices grew softer.  Walking from the station we didn’t speak at all, but it wasn’t until we entered the gate that my breath was gone.  It was so small, but so empty.  I had expected barracks, buildings, walls of names, flowers.  There was one building left, at the far south end of the camp.  It had exhibits, sculptures, memorials, and bouquets.  The rest of Dachau was filled with footprints.  Concrete foundations, placed evenly and exactly in a grid, surrounded by grey gravel.  All of this, a vast expanse of nothing, surrounded by barbed wire and geometric guard towers.

A sculpture of bodies, twisted and writhing, stood out against the vacuum, their fingers sharp like the camp’s fence.  I couldn’t take more than a moment of the grotesque figures, and so I walked on.

I came upon the crematorium, the ovens.  A tall, square chimney spouted from the top, and nothing has ever seemed so irrevocably evil to me, nor, I doubt, ever will.  The building was low, red brick, the same style as the houses in the suburbs around Munich.  But this was a home for the dead.  All of Dachau was.

We left the concentration camp and headed toward other sites.  At the Olympiastadt, where Munich hosted the 1972 Olympics, we looked down on a BMX ramp.   At Schloss Nymphenburg, we made nymphomaniac jokes and admired the tulips in the sunset.  On the train back into town, we commented on the abundance of cute girls in Germany.  And just like that, Dachau was gone, like ashes from a chimney.

The 10:07

Model trains zoom around The Great Train Story at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry

I watched the trains glide on their minuscule tracks, ticking as they crossed each plastic segment.  The slight electric whoosh of each train passed me by in turn, different sizes and scales–HO, N, Standard gauges and more.  The Great Train Story at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry is its own world, immense and tiny all at once.  Watching the trains, though, all I could think of was a man who had passed away two years before.  My grandfather’s death seemed a lifetime away, but his shadow had followed me since that day, January 12, 2008.  He followed me to London, Paris, Rome, Madrid, Munich, he followed me back to Kansas City, he followed me to Des Moines, and now he followed me to the shores of Lake Michigan.

I still wear his ring.  It’s chunky, white silver, with etched, interlocking letters spelling his initials: GED.  My grandmother, his loving wife of 60-some years, gave it to me shortly after her husband left.  Every time I feel it between the bones of my fingers, I feel the bones of his fingers, weathered and thin.  As I watched the trains, I slid my fingertips over the letters, GED, and held onto my memories.

We would stand on the patio behind the house he and my Grandma moved into in their eighties, my fingers dirty from yard work or gutter clearing, as real trains passed across the pond.  Giant, lumbering, orange and black diesel behemoths rumbled the rails, rippling the water’s surface and occasionally stirring a resting goose to action.  Without hesitation, my Grandpa would declare the train.  ”10:07, right on time.”  ”8:42, a bit late.”  At the time, I thought my Grandpa–an extremely intelligent man–had memorized the train timetables.  In fact, he would sneak a glance at his watch at the first signs of railroad activity.  Either way, he was very clever.

He died in the morning, in the house with the patio, my Grandma and his oldest son at his side.  A week later, I was on a plane to Europe.  I mourned for my grandfather in some of the grandest churches in the world, always wishing I could just kneel on the Kansas City carpet beside him.  Leaving the cathedrals and abbeys, I would stand on the platforms of the London Underground, tensed for the first vibrations of an approaching train.  As the headlights blinked into the tunnel darkness, I would slide my cell phone out of my pocket and note the time: 7:27, right on time.

Trophy of a Tempest

Storm clouds whirl over southern Iowa

I pulled off of I-35 and rolled my window down.  A moment earlier my knuckles had been white, squeezing the wheel of my 17-year-old Honda (her name is Helga) as a tempest tried to ruin my evening.  Two moments earlier I had marveled at the swift change of clouds that’s so common in the Midwest.  Now, though, I sat at the top of a deserted exit ramp, the steady tick of my hazards marking time as I prepared my camera.  I leaned down, rolled the lens to zoom, and snapped this shot.  To me, it was a trophy of survival.

My evening had started by loading two vehicles.  First, a duffel bag into Helga.  Then, Rubbermaid tubs, sand bags, tables and more into a large Ford van.  The latter were materials for Drake Day at the Iowa State Fair, an event that I had been deeply involved in organizing, and an event that I was abandoning wholesale in favor of a Kansas City Royals game.  For that, my boss had cursed me.  ”I hope they lose,” she said, as though I had a sliver of hope to begin with.  The Royals did lose, 8-3 (Alex Rodriguez hit three home runs), but her wishes seem to have gone further.

An hour after the loaded van departed for the fairgrounds, I was well south of Des Moines and had just crossed onto the pitted red concrete that comprises I-35 in that part of Iowa.  My least favorite stretch of the drive, this region is barren except for a giant, massively tacky neon cowboy advertising a local casino.  Tonight, though, the Terrible’s Casino eyesore was shrouded by low, deep blue clouds.  As I passed the cowboy’s feet, I entered the maelstrom.

Heavy gusts shoved Helga perpendicular to her path, nearly clipping the narrow orange and white construction cones on either side.  Rain–a deluge–pounded the roof, hood and trunk, smacked the windshield and windows, and almost totally blocked my vision.  A semi about 40 feet ahead of me leapt from view, its tail lights becoming no more apparent than two dying cigarettes.  My speed slowed, halved.  I crawled through the demon weather, wondering just how deep the storm was.  Just as I began to prepare emotionally for my impending end, the skies simply stopped.  No more rain, no wind.  My wiper blades groaned as they scraped a dry windshield.

The sky above me had lifted by thousands of feet, it seemed, and it took to a gorgeous shower of electricity.  Bolts struck the clouds and fizzled, lingering for two, three seconds at a time.  I pulled onto the exit ramp and grabbed my camera bag, dragging it onto the passenger’s seat.  I rolled the window down as I freed my camera, then leaned down, rolled the lens to zoom, and snapped.