Louis’ Forest Park, its fourteen-hundred or so acres home to several museums, a planetarium and a famous zoo—unless a lack of company was what you were after. The municipal theater would be empty, the golf courses and tennis courts and boathouse, too. No one was likely to be taking in any of the statues or paying respects at memorials, either. That made me a rare moonlight visitor to the park’s Korean War Memorial, a giant floral clock maybe thirty-five feet in diameter, formed by thousands and thousands of colorful flowers, mums and sunflowers and more, looking muted in the full moon’s glow, like a hand-tinted photograph, and spelling out below HOURS AND FLOWERS SOON FADE AWAY. Curving around the memorial were a number of stone benches to sit and reflect. Also a number of substantial evergreens to stand behind and wait. Nearby was the fifty-foot high, glass-walled, steel-skeletoned, stone-fronted Art Deco greenhouse known as the Jewel Box, a big tourist destination and frequent site for weddings; but not at three in morning.
