Bill-on-the-Hill

This day got off to a sad but necessary start, following our escape (there's really nothing else to call it) from Chicago and a night in downstate Illinois, in Bloomington-Normal -- nice enough community, with much of what is right about the Midwest and a commendably vigorous, future-oriented attitude, but not exactly a tourist hot spot. Unfortunately, it's also the site of a nursing home in which my mother resides, getting care for her increasingly severe Alzheimer's disease, and that's why we were there. Gads, Alzheimer's is an awful disease. Watching the slow disintegration of someone you love is just unspeakable, and too many millions of people are faced with it every year, with deplorably little progress being made in finding ways to stave it off. Our society should be putting an order of magnitude more effort into solving this ghastly puzzle -- and an order of magnitude less into some ... other ... money sinks -- than it is. Let me recommend, as the Web Site du Jour, http://www.alz.org/memorywalk/overview.asp, wherein one can find information on MemoryWalk, one of the ways of raising public awareness of (and funding for) programs to defeat Alzheimer's. So much more needs to be done -- but you gotta start somewhere.

Following this sad visit with my mother, which I will not describe here, we needed some cheering up, and for us, the best way of accomplishing that is some time in the Great Outdoors. Downstate Illinois, alas, is not richly endowed with opportunities for a wilderness experience, but let me call your attention to an unexpected little oasis in the corn-and-soybeans Sahara: Allerton Park, a preserve maintained by the University of Illinois just outside the small town of Monticello. This 1500-acre site, which doubles as a conference center/retreat (great for weddings), combines well-maintained formal gardens with some secluded woodland hiking trails, and it was just what we needed to lift our spirits this afternoon. The eponymous Robert Allerton was the heir to big Chicago money. His passion, however, was not making money, but rather art, and in the family's holdings in Illinois farm country he saw a way to bring art, and landscape architecture, to the countryside. This park, which he donated to the university in 1946, was the result. One of its little quirks is an "Oriental" theme developed long before such themes were popular in middle America. I'd remembered the "Garden of the Fu Dogs" from a childhood visit long ago and wanted to see if it was still there, and sure enough, it was:

Garden of the Fu Dogs Fu dog

What's a "Fu Dog"? Rather than reading my own highly inexpert description, check out the Wikipedia article, but suffice it to say that it's a rather homely yet endearing bit of statuary derived from the "guardian lion" statues of China. We followed a short hiking trail (which we had completely to ourselves) to this small semi-formal garden and just hung out for a while, enjoying not being in a city, before moving on to the other gardens, of which however I don't have any decent photos. A stop at Allerton is a very pleasant interlude in a day's travel down the length of Illinois, and I recommend it.

From here we continued southwest toward St. Louis, spending the night in a nondescript chain motel in a suburb on the Illinois side, then onward the next morning to our main goal for this trip: Busch Stadium, the home of baseball's St. Louis Cardinals, of whom I have been a rabid fan for every last one of my 50-plus years. (Emily, poor soul, didn't get bitten by the baseball bug until she married me, but she's got it now too, and this stadium-seeing project is as interesting to her as it is to me, although she's not nearly as passionate a Cardinals fan as I am.) We had tickets for a rare Monday afternoon game (most major-league games during the week are at night), and the contrast between this and the Chicago game could not possibly be greater. Weather was absolutely perfect; the storm had finally moved on, leaving transparent skies and temperatures in the seventies. I was quite surprised to see that not only was the weather beautiful; so was the park. It's only about three years old, having replaced an earlier Busch Stadium that was a particularly boring example of the unfortunate trend in 1960s-vintage ballparks toward cookie-cutter similarity and sterility. Many critics consider Busch III, as it's known, to be merely a "nice" park with not as much color and character as some of the other new parks (Camden Yards in Baltimore, Coors Field in Denver, etc.), but we disagree; it has a handsome red (of course) exterior, and from the inside, particularly if you have seats on the right-field line as we did, you can see the Gateway Arch in a very attractive setting. Here's the view from our seats as pre-game batting practice was going on:

Busch Stadium

Another key feature of this park is the statue of "Stan the Man," honoring the greatest of all Cardinals, Stan Musial, at 45 years after his retirement still probably the most beloved figure in all of St. Louis. Here he is:

(Notice all the folks in red in the background? Well, when you're attending a Cardinals game, you will wear Cardinal red; we did, and so did tens of thousands of others.) One of the features of the Musial statue is that it stands in a small patio paved with bricks, on which, for a (fairly hefty) fee, one can have inscribed the names of people, places or things that one would like to honor. While at this game we decided to get a brick memorializing my late father, a Cardinals fan for every last one of his 66-plus years, who died estranged from his family (he wasn't the most lovable of men) but deserving better than he got. It'll be laid in the patio some time this summer, and we hope to see it the next time we see a game there. So here ya go, Dad, you cantankerous old goat; we miss you in spite of it all, and enjoy the view of the game from Stan's feet.

And best of all, the Cardinals won.

I'll pick this up from here in the next installment, as the theme shifts to the Santa Fe Trail, and the trip home.