Caught a two more sessions, had lunch with a friend, listened to my adviser give some tips on a panel and then we rushed to the airport.
And these are my parting thoughts about St. Louis. The cynical consensus seemed to be that people would have preferred a different conference location, but that could be that folks found little to do downtown, diagnosed the WiFi as lousy and had already experienced a 6 a.m. fire alarm.
I’ve only been there twice, and the first visit to St. Louis was on a long layover that let us discover the cross-town trip on the MetroLink to the arch, an eye-opener for many in our little group, and a few minutes at the arch. I’m no expert. There might not be a lot to do, as some people claimed, after you’ve seen the arch and the Cardinals and gone to either Six Flags or Budweiser, or for the hearty, both. But we didn’t come to do those things. St. Louis has seen some hard times, like most everyone else along the Mississippi, even when it wasn’t the Big Muddy that brought those times downstream. But the people we met this trip have all been friendly and kind. If you so much as walk around with a curious look on your face people were willing to stop and offer directions, even if you didn’t need it. People were chatting with strangers in the “We’re all in this together” sense, even if you didn’t know what you were in.
We’re long on hospitality where I’m from, but they have no shortage of it in St. Louis, either.
I did not get to try the barbecue steak sandwich, but maybe next time.
Our hotel was nice. We crashed with a friend, and the pullout sofa could have been much worse.
The airport, is another tragic matter. It took 52 minutes to join the security line and make it through the other side of the metal detectors. A careless TSA guy almost crushed The Yankee with a tall stack of those ubiquitous gray tubs. He did not notice or care. The people working there know they are in a bad spot, the passengers let them hear it, and there’s not much they can do.
They have five detector screening stations. Three were opened. And this was not, we’re told, an unusual crush at the checkpoint. “We don’t have enough people” muttered the second ID checking person. Really? There’s only 20 percent of the country unemployed or underemployed, and most of them would look good in blue. St. Louis County was at an unadjusted 8.8 percent earlier this summer, and everyone is convinced these numbers have been depressed. It doesn’t get much more shovel-ready than a small government job, and yet here we are.
This isn’t about jobs in St. Louis, though, that nightmare is about staffing. This is being two waiters short on Valentine’s Day, only Valentine’s Day is every day.
So we’d arrived at the airport with just over an hour to spare and barely made it to the plane in time. That was nice, but at least my shoes and toiletries are safe. Oh, and the people in line, the poor regulars that fly through this airport frequently, they secretly loathe the place. I’m sure the feeling is mutual. This is what air travel has become.
Oh, and this:
Home, after an inordinate pause to get a jetway in Atlanta. That narrowed and closed our window for barbecue in Newnan, where we learned about the town’s two Medal of Honor winners, Col. Joe M. Jackson and Maj. Steven W. Pless. They received their medals on the same day, and the legend goes that LBJ said something like “There must be something in the water down in Newnan.”
Read the details about what those two great men did and you’ll realize: he was right.
Dinner in town, pizza at Mellow Mushroom, marveling at the suddenly full streets. Everyone is back in town, marking the almost-end of summer.
It could go on a bit longer; I wouldn’t mind.
