I've been in St. Louis for the past week as my wife and her siblings clear out the apartment of her late mother. I've been looking after a brood of kids and decided this past weekend to head out to Ferguson, where a radio station announced there would be a community-spirited Back-to-School bash as part of Unity Week, which is honoring the conflagration that occurred here two years ago following the death of Michael Brown by Officer Darren Wilson.

It turns out that local schools have moved their start dates up real early to get kids out of the heat, unfortunately ensuring that all local pools close early too for the lack of lifeguards. All excepting one...

It poured all day and the kids and I couldn't find a turnoff sign anywhere for Ferguson, and ended up taking what we thought was the right avenue the wrong way into old North St. Louis by the Fairgrounds. As the 'hood got worse around us, I remembered my parents — both of them born and raised in this city — talking about The Fairgrounds over the years. I saw an overgrown park and knew there was a pool in there somewhere, but then got distracted as I came across what I later found out to be the world's tallest Corinthian column, the 154 foot high Grand Avenue Water Tower, stuck in the middle of the road we were on.

Later, I looked up the Fairgrounds and after some searching found out it was the site of St. Louis' first swimming pool, the world's largest for years and in 1949 the location for one of the nation's worst race riots when the city allowed thirty black kids in as an attempt at desegregation only to have them beaten up by a white mob... and then charged for inciting violence. The city's answer was to reinstate segregation. After which many started moving further out of the city.

My parents were in their teens when this all went down.

The morning after my visit through the forgotten area, the daily Post-Dispatch ran news about four shootings and stabbings, two of them fatal, on the streets we'd been driving. That afternoon I tried again, on my own, and made my way to the Ferguson Market where Brown was called in for shoplifting cigarellos. I bought a bottled water, surprised that the place was on a busy corner, and not the sort of inner city bodega-like establishment I'd come to believe it was. The same went for Canfield Drive, where the young man was shot to death on a leafy street where the houses were surrounded by short fences enclosing barbecue equipment and every driveway hosted two or more cars. No buildings had bars on them.

The radio station that first alerted me to the back-to-school event played info on community events, voter drives, Milwaukee and Baton Rouge news involving riots and floods, and the Beyonce "Formation" tour's upcoming dates in town. "Check on your people, it's important," said the deejay. Then an ad ran asking that listeners "don't let tragedy give you toxic stress."

I watched as kids spilled out from school buses, talking excitedly as they passed an older white guy clearing up yard debris without acknowledging their excited brown and black faces. "We must start loving each other," read the sign on one lawn.

Heading back to where I was staying, I started looking for my great-grandfather's house and found it in another old St. Louis neighborhood, once at the end of a streetcar line and now dead-ended with bungalows from the 60s all around. I got out, recognizing the place from my last visit there at age nine, and mentioned to the older black man on its porch how my mom's family once lived there.

"Back when it was a chicken farm," he asked and I replied in the affirmative. He told me how glad he was to move to this spot from the suburbs a decade earlier, then added that he was originally from North St. Louis.

I told him I'd just found the water tower the day before... and learned about the fairgrounds.

The man shook his head.

"Time sure changes everything," he said, a phone starting to ring inside after which he rose to head in and answer it. "But not everything. At least not yet."