I usually try to get away before the sun rises, when the house is still and the road still cool beneath the tires. I leave behind the natural savannah of the Bluegrass, the farms and the fences, the green fields stretching out across the horizon.
I point my car east. It pretty much knows the way.
Over the mountains and up the valley.
I’m home.
Here is a place that deserves a book not just a post, but for now, see the trees lacing over the road, the fences running beside it, the hills rising gently beyond the berm. Farther on, there are stone walls and gnarled osage orange trees dropping plump green hedge apples. There are cattle and horses and crisped corn stalks swaying.
Pisgah Pike is not just a road; it is a national historic district. Its twists and turns are protected, its houses and outbuildings, too.
Knowing this brings a certain comfort, that beauty is worth keeping —and is being kept here.
There were two of them, composite photographs of my fourth and sixth grade classes. At first the faces were familiar but nameless. But the longer I looked, the more the names returned: Teresa, Diane, Melissa, Amelia, Jody, Joan, Carol, Julia, Peggy, Debbie. And from the earlier one, Dickie, Jay and Charles. (We were the one outlier class still “mixed” at that age. The nuns preferred same-sex education after third grade.)
Fourth grade. Nine years old. Before I worried about my hair. Before I cared about boys. We played four square (the ball game not the social media app) across the divided playground — two boys on one side, two girls on the other. (Yes, the playground was “same sex,” as well, divided down the middle.)
What do I remember most about that year? That we had a lay teacher, Mrs. Hollis, a bit of an outlier herself. And that at the end of day, when she had crammed us with all the religion, math, science, reading, writing and social studies we could hold, she played recordings of Broadway musicals on the stereo.
I’ve loved them ever since.
(This is the “welcome” mat for Christ the King School.)
To visit a hometown is to walk with ghosts. To look at streets and see what used to be. To peer in windows and imagine life on the other side of time.
A church, a house, a park, a store.
And here, a school. My first. Here in this hallway we waited for a drink at the fountain on the first warm days of May. We lit the Advent candle in December. We scuttled in with our new penny loafers and pencils and school bags the first week of September.
All so long ago now as to have been a dream. But it wasn’t a dream. I have the evidence right here.
This isn’t my headline. I purloined it from an article about how March Madness isn’t what it used to be, how a combination of big money, “one and done,” the glamor of television and its preference for the slam-dunk over the mid-range shot — most of all the steady encroachment of the spectacle that is football — how all of this is changing the sport.
But that’s not why it’s March Sadness for me.
It’s March Sadness for me because the University of Kentucky isn’t in the NCAA tournament.
How’s that for entitlement? But it’s worse than that. Not only do Kentucky fans expect to be in the “big dance” — they expect to be in the Final Four.
It’s good that “Selection Sunday” was also St. Patty’s Day. Thinking green helped us not to feel blue.
(A view of Lexington from the University of Kentucky Library.)
I worry about my hometown, worry that it has lost itself. Known for horses and horse farms, it has allowed some to be enveloped or developed — one into a mega shopping center. Meanwhile, it erects shrines to the thoroughbred.
Like so many places, it may not know what it has, what if offers, just as itself. No need to market or develop. Just leave alone.
How many other places, small hometowns across the country, need the same?
To walk the streets of my hometown is to see not just what is but what used to be. Vacant storefronts, open blocks, streets moved and one-wayed and changed beyond recognition. They are overlaid with the bustle of the past, with people and places no longer here.
It’s double vision, a condition only open to natives. Here, and here only, I have special powers.
That street, it used to end at the field. I remember when it was cut through. That corner, it was the epicenter of downtown. A dog hung out there, Smiley Pete. He was mean but everyone loved him. When he died, the city put up a plaque to honor him.
Now, even the plaque is gone.
As I drive east today I’ll be thinking how if I were making this trek 221 years ago I would not be traveling through three states, but through one. Kentucky was part of Virginia until 1792.
Now these states are separate. But once they were part of the same large region that stretched from the ocean to the “first west.” One were their hills and valleys, one their rivers and streams. The mountain range that divides them was shared.
Yesterday I drove the back roads of the Bluegrass, hopping out of the car often to stick my camera between gate bars, snap photographs and, sometimes, just to sigh.
Once these two places, these two important places, these two poles of my heart — once they were one.
I live nowhere near the scenes of my childhood, haven’t grown into middle age in the land of my youth and young adulthood, so returning there can make me dizzy.
Yesterday we stopped at Magee’s Bakery for cheese danish and sat across from my old high school, now defanged, serving as a county education building. I found the windows of my algebra 2 classroom, remembered Baldy Gelb, football coach and math teacher, could almost see the chalk dust motes floating in the air.
It was a long time ago, of course, but looking at that brick building (how can it sit there so placidly? what happened to all the adolescent angst?), I felt that I could have reached out and opened the door to that classroom, found my seat and struggled with a quadratic equation.
I could tell the difference before I reached the first dip in the road. A day earlier I had misjudged, found myself trudging through rain, my socks damp, my hair wet. But yesterday, I stepped into a drenched clean world.
On my way, an empty mail truck. An early lunch for the carrier? We on his leeward side were still waiting, but those whose letters had arrived were slowly shuffling to their mailboxes, sweaters pulled tight, suspicious glances at the sky.
In the new section of the neighborhood a worker swept the wet street in front of a construction site. He seemed only to be moving mud, but he greeted me cheerily.
Down at the corner the cars zoomed by, as they always do, and the dying sycamore dropped its leaves. The rain came too late for that poor tree. And the big white house that was abandoned for so long, it still looked abandoned, even though someone seems to be living in the place. So a good soaking doesn’t solve everything, but it did put a spring in my step.
On the way home, I waved at the cars I passed. People do that here.
