Axar.az presents an article, "Around Here" by John Samuel Tieman.

My regular readers are accustomed to me talking about politics, God, war, even sex and such. It occurs to me that maybe folks want to know the simplest stuff. Like where I live.

A little background. I've traveled the world. I was in the army. I've lived and worked and studied in many places. Then I returned home. I married a woman who grew up four blocks from me, a woman who likewise lived, worked, and studied in many places. I traveled the world in order to marry the gal next door.

I live in University City, Missouri. I live in the very center of the United States. If you took a dart and threw it at a map of the US – I suspect that throwing darts at a US map is not unknown overseas – when you hit the very middle, that's Missouri. The Mississippi River is a short drive from my house. You can see our famous Arch from U. City.

University City is an inner-ring suburb of St. Louis. I just heard us described as an “urban suburb” Meaning that, to the casual observer, we're a neighborhood in St. Louis. We do, however, have our own little downtown, our own little civic plaza, our own charm. We're easily the most liberal community in the region, not that that's an achievement in Missouri.

One charm is that we are the most diverse neighborhood in the region. In our neighborhood, you're more likely to run into a Hasidic Jew than a hillbilly. That said, we know folks who have traded teeth for meth. It happens. It's just not as common as folks think. Which brings us to our new t-shirts. My beloved has one that reads, “Washington University in St. Louis”. Mine reads, “Don't Meth With Missouri.” And neither of us have snipped-off the sleeves. Oh, yeah, and neither of us says “Missour-ah”. Although I do say “Wa-R-shington”, and she just hates that.

Those native to here – like my wife, me – speak the Midlands Dialect of American English. Our dialect sounds a lot like the PBS evening news. My wife speaks the acquired standard all the time. I can switch back and forth between the acquired standard and what I call “High Hoosier”. Meaning I'm comfortable with both “I am so pleased we have gathered” and “Bein's as how we's here ...”. Some of my neighbors speak Spanish. Some speak Yiddish.

Fun facts. One in five of my neighbors is Jewish. 12% of my neighbors don't speak English at home. Half my neighbors are Black. University City has 36,000 citizens. Metro St. Louis has about 3 million. Part of the metro area, “the East Side” we say, is in southern Illinois.

When we walk around my neighborhood, you'll notice two things. One, it's quiet. A couple of hundred yards from my door, there's a crosswalk. From my front porch, you can hear that little beeping for the visually impaired. Most evenings, the loudest sound is the highway two miles away. Second, it's green. Until it was struck by lightning, our front yard boasted the largest linden tree in Missouri.

The whole state is lush like that. The Ozarks, for example. The Ozark Mountains are really huge hills, rolling hills with deep valleys. Once you leave the city, it's as if you enter an enormous national park. I love driving through the Ozarks in the morning. I sometimes think that when God sees the cruelty of humanity, our carelessness with nature, when God starts to doubt creation, He remembers the Ozarks in the morning, in the early morning when the fog still lies low in the valleys, when the fog wraps those valleys in more shades of gray and blue than any language can name.

But about my neighborhood. My little one block street was built in 1954, the same year my wife was born. It's a private street. The fellows who built it first built all the post-war housing near us. Then they bought this land, this street, and built each other's homes.

There's a dad playing catch with his kids. I'm the city councilman from this neighborhood. So I always stop and talk with folks. It's the best part of being on the City Council. I love my neighbors. I meet some of the most interesting folks, folks who live just down the street and around the corner. I chat for an hour with a young Hasidic woman, an immigrant from Israel. I sit on a stoop with a Catholic priest. A Lutheran minister gives me a copy of his beautiful sermon on “The Beatitudes”. A woman tells me how her basement flooded. One fellow I chat with invites me to join the family for dinner, a tempting invitation I politely decline. So many interesting people. A restaurateur. A sculptor. A barkeep. A woman, a retired Navy captain, over 100 years old. I love these folks. Near here, there's a century-old grocery store that was converted into a restaurant. Around the corner is a former synagogue that is now a nondenominational church. I admire their pastor..

Just a bit east there's another church. Christ The King. Catholic. Catholic when Catholic meant Latin. I was practically raised in that church and its school. The other day, for the first time in forever, I heard the hymn "O Sanctissima". I remember it from my youth, from this church. When we walk past that church, I can almost hear that Latin hymn. Then, for a moment, for just a moment, there they all were. My grandparents, my parents, my aunt, my uncle, Monsignor Ryan, Sister Mary Amabilis and all the Sisters Of Mercy. They're all gone now. I'm 76. I've reached the age where I have memories of my childhood, and I realize that I'm the only one left. But they left two gifts. One, the memory of a time when I was, as a child, greatly loved. That and the words and the music – “O Sanctissima” – and once right here we sang this hymn and we knew, knew with a perfect knowledge, that these words and this music and this place, that this is holy.