Watson's world is turning

We're in Kansas City, riding with Tom Watson to lunch, when he nods toward Brush Creek, a little stream moving along a manicured gully through the fancy Mission Hills neighborhood.
"See how the creek bottom is paved with concrete? For four, five miles, it's paved," he says.
A creek that's a highway?
"They say Tom Pendergast had a friend in the concrete business. Also, they say there are bodies in the concrete."
Some place, Kansas City.
The haberdasher Harry Truman might have become steel-spined, give- 'em-hell Harry Truman anywhere. He for sure did it in Kansas City, where he sold shirts, collars and hats until Tom Pendergast, the notorious political boss of the heartland, decided Harry ought to run for office for the greater good of Kansas City, Harry Truman and especially Tom Pendergast.
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Wyatt Earp drank in Kansas City, Wild Bill Hickok played faro, and dusty cowboys lusted to reach "the rip roarin' Sodom and Gomorrah of the Short Grass." Such tourists kept 147 brothels humming, including the famous mansion of Annie Chambers, who at 90 discovered God and gave her mansion over to missionaries, who, first thing, redecorated.
Today all that's gone. In its place stand art museums, theaters, hospitals and 20th-century cathedrals where football and baseball are worshiped. Patrons of the arts and philanthropists have long since tamed Kansas City, though the poet Carl Sandburg once passed through, gazed upon the work in progress and wrote, "They have made their steel skeletons like themselves-Lean, tumultuous, restless."
So we're in town to visit the lion in his den, Watson in Kansas City, a man lean, tumultuous and, now, restless.
What's happening with Watson happens with most of us sooner or later. Just when we think we know all the answers, life asks new questions. Certainty becomes confusion. Doubt creeps in on little cat feet.