The November air carried just the right hint of crispness, the kind that wakes you up without biting your nose. And though I’ve walked these marble halls before—sometimes in protest, sometimes in policy, and sometimes just passing through—today I walked them without agenda. That, in itself, was a novelty.
I stood beneath the rotunda of the Missouri State Capitol and looked up like a man who had never seen it before. It’s funny how we forget to look up. The dome, that magnificent eye to the heavens, framed the stories of Missouri’s past in murals and marble. I’d stood here as an activist once, with signs and chants and just enough outrage to keep warm. I’d returned as a councilman, shaking hands and making the rounds, nodding gravely while trying to remember names. But today, as my students filed off to their scheduled duties with their JAG instructor, I was left to wander—not as an official, not even as an educator, but simply as a tourist.
There’s a kind of reverence in playing the tourist in a place you think you know. You notice things you’ve ignored for years. The coolness of the stone under your feet. The sudden hush that falls when you cross from corridor into chamber. The muffled echoes of schoolchildren learning what “bicameral” means.
In the Hall of Famous Missourians, I tipped my head at the bronze visages of men and women who once did things great enough to warrant sculpture. Some were politicians. Others poets. A few I didn’t recognize at all, which felt like a personal failure—but perhaps that's the point of such a hall. To remind us we are always missing part of the story.
I took my time with the museum. There’s something comforting in dioramas, in the way they freeze a moment that would otherwise slip past us. Trappers. Traders. Teachers. Tools worn down by honest work. I paused at a display of Civil War artifacts and thought not of glory or strategy, but of cold boots and letters never answered. The kind of things you don’t see when you're just trying to pass a bill or catch the next committee meeting.
Outside, the students would be comparing notes and making plans. Inside, I lingered. Not because I had to. Because I could.
And maybe that’s what struck me most. Today, I was untethered. No speech to give. No agenda to push. Just a man in a beautiful building on a beautiful day, remembering what it means to be curious.
There’s something sacred in reclaiming a place. Today, I claimed the Missouri State Capitol not as a citizen, nor a councilman, but as a traveler—eyes open, pace slowed, heart full.