The City Museum with Kaylee

Gemey and I took our granddaughter Kaylee to the City Museum last night for Christian Family Day. Considering that Bob Cassily has festooned his City Museum with sculptures of nude women here and there and provides a place called Beatnik Bobs where a guy can get a beer and a cigarette, this may mean that local Christians are becoming a little less uptight.

Kaylee is 100% girl. Blonde and twinkly, she smiles and laughs easily. In the past, she has been shy and easily off-put by dark places and strange environs, but she has blossomed into a largely fearless creature, and the City Museum was just her cup of tea.

Imagine a place built by 11 year olds who have tied up the lawyers and can weld. Contained within the old International Shoe building in downtown St. Louis, the museum isn't so much a place to learn facts and see demonstrations as a place to explore. There are plenty of places to crawl, run, skip and slide, all of it crafted out of industrial cast-offs. Kaylee scurried up what looked like a mangled slinky forged from hoops of rebar. The tube formed by the hoops twisted this way and that as it ascended from the 2nd floor to the third. Up and down she crawled, enjoying the challenge.

Outside there is an enormous structure that is half playground, half post apocalyptic sculpture. Walkways lead hither and yon to various platforms with myriad activities. There is a stone tower, which allows a visitor to get a gargoyles'-eye view of decorative parts attached to the battlements. A huge tree whose bark is composed of rusting railroad spikes and plates of copper supports a treehouse inside which children and adults climb. Kaylee does laps around these catwalks, scuttling in and out of tunnels. She easily outpaces us. I am burdened with a backpack and our camera is too expensive to risk banging up against unyielding steel. I lumber after her, eschewing the narrow passages she jets through like a gopher on the tail end of his last dose of Ritalin. I have to go around, finding a passage more in keeping with my dimensions.

Kaylee stops to spend a great deal of time on a "J" shaped lexan wall. At the top is a sheer drop-off, the bottom a sudden curve. She sits on the edge, at least a dozen feet up, and plunges, her fall arrested by the partial parabola at the skidding and, coming to rest on the steel deck. Over and over she delights herself with the cycle of climb, sit, fall and slide pausing only to eat part of a banana and quaff Dr. Pepper while grandma and I watch.

Only yesterday it seems Kaylee would cast her eyes on the world and clutch our hands in trepidation. I warms my soul to see her out of her shell leaping to embrace the alien. How sweet to have my hand held out of affection rather than fear.

Tim McNabb