Rest and Thoughts of ceilings...

Thursday was a day for sitting very very still and reading a little bit after my impulsive walking binge. The kind of day that found me face down in a new book I’d heard about from the tour guide on Wednesday. It’s called St. Louis Architecture: Three Centuries of Classic Design and was published (in Australia, natch) in 2010 as one in the American City series. There has been and continues to be a certain amount of tearing down and building up and changing use of streets and neighborhoods, it is a part of the life of every city and every life form. (Understanding, of course that in the case of something like a guinea pig: the streets and neighborhoods are allegorical in and not meant to suggest any literal reading of the anatomy of such a critter.)

I’ve also got a book about St. Louis that came out in 2000, I think, and while it is a much more broadly based study of buildings and churches, its focus is not the architecture as it relates to the study of that field. There is an enormous amount about the history of places in the city that is learned by looking at the buildings that stand there. I’ve had difficulty getting into the book because it moves around a bit and the maps, while clear and showing the locations of the buildings and districts very specifically, use a numbering system that acts more as a barrier to understanding.

I have now seen pictures of the inside of the Central Library. They inspire me even more to want to wander in the relatively unpeopled stacks and lie on the floor of the delivery room to stare up at the ceiling: a thing I also want to do in City Hall, the Old Post Office and Union Station.

That wouldn’t be a bad way to plan a tour of the city, really – ceilings that you want to gaze at from a horizontal position. I can imagine scores of nattily dressed tourists sporting skorts and yoga mats covering the floor of the Old Courthouse, cameras flat on the ground, pointed up. Conversations about how to get into the Wainwright tomb to take a peek at its rarely photographed (tho incredibly gorgeous) ceiling, or the Shaw Botanical Garden Library and Museum flittering over Important Information from the tour guide. I think I want to be that tour guide. You’d have to be trustworthy and inspire a sense of fearlessness in your temporary flock. Hm. I wonder if I can find an app for that…

Today there was rest, for tomorrow there is much to explore and to see and ponder.

Oh, but new favorite thing: Cats landing on the smooth table surface with all the grace of an albatross not in flight. Ethel slid on her haunches (surprised as all get out), knocked a book off the table, knocked several breakable things (which did not break) into each other and then careened right into her brother sitting on the windowsill. Within nanoseconds they were both on the other side of the apartment.

They meant to do that.