I woke up the next morning to a new year. It was my birthday, and I was delighted to spend it in a place I knew and loved. I started with breakfast at Toast on Market, a sumptuous concoction of peanut butter and cream cheese topped with honey and bananas. Then I took Tamu for a walk, and he got a birthday surprise because under the picnic bench where we stopped, somebody had dropped almost an entire package of vanilla cream cookies. He wolfed down many before I noticed his find. I am grateful they did not contain chocolate, or we would have had a very different day. Instead, I had a sugared up dog.
Along Market, we went to a gallery that was featuring portraits of some of the Somali-origin residents of the area, which were beautifully done. Then we went to Waterfront Park for a stroll along the Ohio River to burn off our irresponsible breakfasts. It was a beautifully clear day, and uncrowded, so we were able to take in the various monuments to the town’s history without a lot of distractions.
Our next stop was a stroll down Fourth Street, which is a pedestrian mall in the heart of Louisville’s entertainment district. I know it well, because for a number of months in 1999-2000, I worked on a contract supporting Kindred Healthcare (then Vencor) and stayed week by week at the historic Brown Hotel across Fourth Street from Vencor’s HQ. It was strange to think that time in my life was so long in the past. It had been an intense time in which the hotel was more my home than the place where I paid rent, and my colleagues at Vencor and I shared the goings-on in our lives very closely. After that contract, I had moved on to graduate school and caregiving and then life in the nation’s capitol. Perhaps because it was my birthday, the return there, both the familiarity and the strangeness, forced some me to some introspection. I did not look at that time as belonging to a younger self, despite how much I had experienced in the nearly two decades that had passed since then. I felt as the same person. For Tamu, it was all new, but for me it was a past home. I remember the way the concierge fed me every night off the hors d’oeuvres and drinks of the concierge floor because I had no other place to go, except to my hotel room and I lived on that floor. I remember that I became central to managing the project while I was trying also to move on to graduate school and the client kept extending me to the point my company wondered if I would return. Tamu and I headed down Fourth and I wondered if the old Five and Dime where I would run to buy emergency nylons was still there in the upward development of the neighborhood, or if it had been priced out. I still have some of those knee-high stockings because I never have much cause to wear (and run) them. So many other meaningful things have come and gone from my life in that time, but somewhere in the back of a drawer are these thick stockings hastily purchased on a January day, whose cold I still remember.
We stopped at the historic marker honoring Thomas Merton, the Trappist Monk who had an epiphany at the corner of Fourth and Walnut: “I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers,” which led him back into the world as a contemplative, rather than away from it as he had been at Gethsemani (more on that site later in the trip). And so another, even earlier layer my past was staring at me. Merton was a piece of my life before my consulting days, not something shared with Louisville friends. There was something reassuring to be reminded of him there, of his transcendent moment amidst the bustling shoppers in March 1958 that remained noteworthy nearly 60 years later, despite the churn and change of my own life, and the continued bustle of Fourth Street.
The day had turned unexpectedly hot, and it was clear that Tamu would have to spend most of it in the hotel air conditioning if I were going to make the stops I wanted. He was lingering outside places with marble entries, not wanting to walk any further. My dinner plans with the folks from the library had fallen apart, so I stacked the rest of the day with tours and decadent food to celebrate my day. I stopped into the Kentucky Museum of Arts & Culture, and was able to take in the exhibits very quickly. That proved to be fortunate, as my next stop was the Muhammad Ali Center, a museum honoring the boxing champion and native son. It is a very interesting and uplifting venue, tracing the life and career of the man born Cassius Clay, who rose to the heights of boxing during the era of Civil Rights and the Vietnam War, converted to Islam, and was often controversial in his principles, which he was never shy about voicing. The center provides excellent background on Ali’s life and a social history of the times as well as an upbeat message about the power of hard work and spirituality. I was there until it closed.
For dinner, I headed to my favorite Louisville restaurant, The Irish Rover, which bills itself as a pub but has a dining room and full dinner menu. The salmon burger is still on the menu, which I devoured. Then I was off to Homemade Ice Cream and Pie Kitchen for dessert. As I often do when faced with many great choices, I asked the counter helper for advice about the key lime pie, and she admitted that she had never tried it. She also does not like fruit pies, so she could not discuss the strawberry rhubarb either. Since these really are foundational pie offerings (I would assume basic eating for pie shop employees), I asked her what pie she eats, and learned that she prefers things like the Reese’s chocolate peanut butter cream. Ok, I thought, so do I, but really, it’s like pie porn. What’s not to like? It’s candy done up as a pie. Are we not teaching the fundamentals anymore? You don’t know what a key lime tastes like when you work in a pie shop? We really have failed her. Perhaps it started when we took Latin out of education. A hundred years later or so and we only consume candy-pie. Of course, I kept all this to myself, which was hard because then she offered to make the key lime a la mode. It’s like an insult to pie. Cream pies don’t take ice cream! Ice cream sits on a warmed up crusted fruit pie. Sigh. I went for the strawberry-rhubarb a la mode (and if you have to ask me if I want it heated then you need to find a different line of work). It was great.
Tamu rejoined me for a walking tour of Old Louisville, the historic neighborhood where I had squatted as a sublet in somebody’s rented apartment during my brief time working with refugee resettlement in 2005. Between running back and forth to northern Ohio, I never explored the neighborhood. The guide assured us that this part of Louisville is the next Savannah, then regaled us with ghost stories, as the tour was supposed to be of Haunted Old Old Louisville. The buildings, decorated with the full bloom of spring, were gorgeous, but I don’t remember the ghost stories.
It had been a long and appropriately indulgent birthday. After two and a half days in the city, it was time to press on to unfamiliar parts of the state.