My prologue

Saint Joseph, Missouri and I were born on the same day.

Saint Joseph became a part of this world on July 26th, 1843.

I became a part of Saint Joseph on July 26th, 1977.

One-hundred and forty-three years between us, from beginning to beginning.

Between those beginnings so many names, so many births and deaths, trickled through the area originally known as Blacksnake Hills.

It is overwhelming.

Saint Joseph was already a formed universal organism of a million causes that led to a million effects and back again. The city I was born into was so forcefully in motion that it couldn’t help but wash over me. A wave rushing past my droplet.

But my droplet was a part of it.

This book is full of effects, full of causes, full of the never-ending cycle of lives intersecting.

I portray the roots of Saint Joseph, the history of what it was when I was born, in the only way I know how.

Through stories.

I add my conjecture, my empathy, my imagination to all of it. Everything I write is based on fact, on things that can be measured.

But I do imagine.

I imagine what it was like to be Joseph Roubidoux standing at the front of his cabin alone, a fur-trader with no real idea of the impact his name would have on history.

I do this because history is fluid. It changes based on the narrator. There is the recordable, the date of births, the date of deaths, the time of an event. But there is also the intangible, and that will never be captured. Historians can study accounts, study words, study recordings, but they cannot measure the truth of the past.

The truth is perceptive. It shifts with point of view. Every conflicting truth can be as valid as the other.

As for my personal story, I have done my best to be true to my memory within this book. I have attempted to avoid any embellishment or falsehoods.

But that’s the thing. It all relies on my memory, my perception, my truth.

And like me, the memories are fallible.

So whomever reads these stories and lived them with me, or was on the periphery of them, and does not agree with my accounts:

You are right.

And so am I.

For as much as we crave it, universal truth is especially wispy and unattainable.

The truth of memory reveals less about an event and more of the person recalling the event itself.

And that’s what this book is, it is an exploration of me and of a city.

Saint Joseph is something very specific for me.

It can be the complete opposite thing for another.

That is okay. Because it has to be. We have no choice. Our journeys are, by definition, our own.

The people and places that form us become fractured. They become thousands of ingredients and sources for so many lives and events.

Forever shifting, never defined.

Saint Joseph is a home that gave me so many loves, so many moments of happiness and support.

It is also the place that tormented me, fueled my loneliness, bred my self-hate and fears.

It is both of those things at the very same time.

And my presence helped form the city.

All of us leave a ripple of influence around us.

The city, the community, and myself, are all symbiotic. We swirl through the universe together on our journeys, influencing each other until we are indistinguishable pieces of the cosmos.

So while I left Saint Joseph in my twenties, though I have trouble returning there for even a few hours, it is still with me. The person I am in my forties is directly related to the child I was in this city.

And the city is slightly different since I joined it on its one-hundredth and forty-third birthday.

As I write this, I am forty-three

Saint Joseph is One-hundred and eighty-six.

And one thing is abundantly clear.

I am from Saint Joseph.

Saint Joseph is from me.

-July 26th 2020