Kansas City - through the memory glass

In early May, Remy and I went to Kansas City, Missouri, for a week of relaxation and visiting with my favorite brother-in-law who is soon to be married. Despite the fact that I made furtive promises to the internet and took copious amounts of photos, I never updated about our trip. Now that two months have passed and I have no idea where those photos could be, tucked away in some ambiguous folder on the hard drive no doubt, I have only the foggiest recollection of what we did. This is perhaps a blessing as any recap that I could give would be filled only with the most pertinent of information instead of the long, drawn-out and overly verbose ramblings that have become my oeuvre.

Our itinerary was bloated, as per usual, filled with ambitious trips to visit long lost friends and college roommates. In an ideal world, we would have arrived in Indianapolis on the first night but, this world being far from perfect, we slept somewhere near Fort Wayne, canceled our breakfast plans with our dear friend Dawn, and headed straight for Bloomington, Indiana.

Leaving the cats to recuperate in the hotel room, we walked into town, trying desperately to remember where we had lived for so many years. Nearly an hour into our stroll, we reached campus and sought out our old haunts, digging for CDs in the few stores that remained, telling nostalgic stories about the people we knew, the things that we had uncovered in the dusty bins. We balked at what had changed, smiled at what had not, ate once familiar food and walked back to the hotel again at the end of the day. We slept like the dead.

The following morning, we headed out to Terre Haute to visit a friend. Along the way, we remembered an abandoned house we would always pass with a crooked upstairs window. Having the luxury of time, we stopped to photograph it and to pluck through its creepy, discarded contents. For a moment, we thought we had been discovered when a truck turned tail at the sight of us emerging from the tall yellow grass. I don't think either of us breathed until we reached the county line.

Our friend was thinner but mostly unchanged from five years before. He had become a bit of a shut-in, living on disability with his mother in an empty apartment. Strange, how people become themselves over time. We saw only flickers of who he once was as our visit wore on, though the longer we stayed, the more he returned. He pleaded with us not to go and cited our departure as the ending to all that was glorious in his life.

Leaving much later than we had planned, we pushed on toward Kansas City. Driving through the midwest, I constantly watch the skies for funnel clouds, particularly when dark things lurk on the horizon. My fears made manifest, at least to a certain extent, we collided with a wicked storm in the flat and shelter-less expanses of Missouri's farmland. Safe on the other side, we were nonetheless delayed and eventually made it to the apartment in the small hours and thus began our week of doing next to nothing save eating, shopping and visiting.

I have a pile of projects that I intend to complete in a hospital bed one day, when I have nothing but the time that is so elusive to me now. As fantastic as great lengths of nothing seem to me now, I discovered in Kansas City that there is little worse than boredom. By the end of the week, I was anxious to go and do.

The one bit of going and doing that we dictated was the First Friday experience. Kansas City is a pleasant enough place: clean, somewhat bustling, friendly. It possesses great art museums, two of which we visited (the Kemper and the Nelson-Atkins) and a good number of galleries and restaurants, all of which seem to participate in this First Friday event.

Goodbyes said, hugs given, we eventually headed back home by way of Chicago to visit a college friend for the afternoon. Scott is now a graduate student at NorthWestern which boasts a beautiful campus and close proximity to Lake Michigan. He gave us the poor man's tour of the town, we bought him lunch and then we were on our way back home to Detroit.

Since our trip, we've returned to Kansas City for the wedding and, after a second chance, I still stand behind my original assessment: benign in every way. For someone who has managed to fall in love with the grittiness and unpredictability of the Motor City, I can't say I'm in much of a hurry to return.