<

I don't know what I'm getting at, other than I think it's sad that we expect such perfection from people in the public eye. Not that they should be excused from bad behavior. No, I don't know where the line. I just think there needs to be more respect for eccentricity, because that's so often the root of invention and genius.

Watching the documentary and concert filled me with an uncalled-for amount of pride. I'm not from St. Louis originally, but Chuck is. We're both from Missouri, and I hold a degree of civic pride for my fellow Missourians that borders on mental illness.

This is how close I've come to Chuck Berry. My grandfather's name is Charles Berry. The only time he's gone by Chuck has been in recent years when my in-laws started calling him by that name instead of his usual Charles or Charlie. The switch to Chuck also might have been brought on by this incident.

A few years ago, my grandparents got a late-night phone call. My grandmother answered, and on the other end of the phone was an old man, looking for Chuck Berry. Not my grandpa. He was looking for Chuck Berry, and was calling all the numbers he could find for Charles/Charlie/Chuck Berrys in Missouri. My grandmother talked to him for a bit, and learned that the man had once played in Chuck's band years and year before. He was at the end of his life and was tying up loose ends, including ones with the other Chuck Berry.

No one in my family had ever made that connection before, that our Charlie is Chuck Berry from Missouri. Grandpa Chuck just happens to be two years and five days older than the other Chuck. And white. And he doesn't play guitar like a ringing a bell. Or duckwalk. I've heard rumors that he can sing, though. Maybe we can talk him into a verse of "Maybelleine" at Granny's birthday party next month.

Chuck (the famous one) is 80 years old, and he still plays at least one show a month in St. Louis at Blueberry Hill. In the eight years I've lived here, I've only seen him once, in 2003. I'm generally not a fan of seeing performers far past their prime, as it's usually embarrassing, a fact illustrated to its full extent at the Loretta Lynn spectacle I witnessed in 2005. But I think seeing Chuck is a part of living in St. Louis, just like acknowledging the Gateway Arch whenever it happens to be in view. If you don't acknowledge the history in your own backyard, then pretty soon every backyard in the country's going to look exactly the same.

When I was in school, I got so sick of having Mark Twain shoved down my gullet in every English and history class. It wasn't until I went to college with people who didn't spend their early education being flogged with a copy of "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" did I realize that not everyone got the Twain education us Missouri kids got, and just how lucky we were to get such first-hand knowledge of one of the greatest writers of all time.

I grew up less than a mile from The Maple Leaf Club, where Scott Joplin composed his most influential pieces of music. Again, I didn't realize how important this was until I took an American music class in college that pointed out Joplin was the first to cross color lines, taking influence from both upper-class white music and traditional slave spirituals. Had he not crossed that line, which eventually led to blues, jazz, and rock 'n' roll, then what?

Chuck Berry did the same. He took "race" music and added an element of the hillbilly music that was popular in St. Louis at the time. Had he not done that, who would have inspired John Lennon, Keith Richards, and Eric Clapton to pick up their guitars and learn?

Where would I be if none of that had happened? I'm sure I'd be here, and there would be something else that reaches me the way music does, but I can't fathom what it would be. I don't want anything different than what I've got.

There was a song by The Rainmaker, a band out of Kansas City in the 1980s, that created one of my favorite scenarios: what would it be like to float down the Mississippi in a rowboat with three of the most important Missourians in history - Mark Twain, Harry Truman, and Chuck Berry? Listen for yourself.

This is what I'm going to miss when we move across the river to Illinois. I'm going to miss being a Missourian. I guess I'll just need to find out more about that Illinois Lincoln fella.