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Category: Kentucky

The Concert

The Concert

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The tickets were a gift, generous and unbidden, and so the concert was, too. It had been a while since I sat in a hall while music poured over me, and I had forgotten how exciting it can be. Even the preliminaries: A rush to find parking in the limpid early evening, a parade of evening-dressed concertgoers entering the hall, taking a seat quickly before the lights dimmed.

The featured performer was Itzhak Perlman, and Lexington audiences are not used to having him around. The applause was loud and sustained — even before he began to play. But then — ahh — he did, and there was that familiar, charged concert stillness, and the violin singing out over it, taking us along.

 Perlman hunched over this violin, seemingly at one with it, and when he finished the opening section of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, he used the fingers of his right hand, slightly cupped, to gesture “come here, come here,” to the first violin section, asking them for more, for a swell of sound to answer his lone voice. And they responded, this student orchestra that was most definitely not the New York or Vienna Philharmonic but which, last night, must have felt, just for a moment, like it was.

When the last notes sounded, the audience jumped to its feet.

Whistle and Wheels

Whistle and Wheels

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Early morning, twenty degrees cooler, I’m out early before a long drive.

The day is moist and full of bird song. In the distance, the sound of a train whistle, long and low. I can even hear the clatter of wheels on rail.

It’s the sound of leaving.

Walking to Bedtime

Walking to Bedtime

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It stays light until almost 10 here on the western edge of the eastern time zone. Which means that if you take a stroll after a late dinner, you are walking until (almost) bedtime.  Cicadas give way to katydids and bats dart from tree shadows into a still bright patch of sky.

It’s cooler now, only 95 (!) with a hint of a breeze.  The hum of air conditioners is punctuated by the shoosh-shoosh of sprinklers. Roosting birds chirp as they dip into the short-lived puddles.

The evening is so calm and inviting that I stay out longer than I’d planned. Longer than my shoes are meant to go. But I’m drawn farther by the sight of orange-lit houses opening their windows to the street and by tree trunks darkening into nightfall.

I walked from day into evening; I walked to bedtime.

The Brown Grass

The Brown Grass

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Lawns are parched here in Kentucky, the grass crunches underfoot. I get thirsty just looking at the scorched fields, as if in hydrating myself I can somehow freshen the air. “We’re not the Bluegrass anymore,” Dad jokes. “We’re the Brown Grass.”

While the Independence Day fireworks display wasn’t canceled, the Lexington mayor banned everything else.  No firecrackers, sparklers or Roman candles. It’s a hot, mean summer here, 99 degrees in the shade.

Maybe it’s just wishful thinking, but the storm that’s been teasing us for hours seems more likely now.  The sky has darkened, and, at their higher elevations, the oaks and maples bend with the wind. Will we soon be drenched in sheets of rain, will rivulets run down the driveway and into the streets?

Or is it like those tarmac puddles that shimmer on the summer highway and disappear as soon as you draw close to them?

48 Hours

48 Hours

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To return home is to find your way back when you didn’t know you were gone. To return home is to see what happens when you weren’t looking.

What happens when you don’t know where home is?

That’s why I pay attention to the feelings that accompany arrival.

I’m in Kentucky for 48 hours. It isn’t long enough.

Eastern Light

Eastern Light

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Here on the outer edge of Eastern Standard Time the sun is late to rise. But when it does, it floods the backroom with morning light. That’s what it’s doing right now.

A riot of rays spills in from the east, silhouetting the lamp and globe, which turn into out-size back-lit shadows.

It dawns on me that I can make hand puppets in this light, and I do, a long gangly goose that laughs and quacks his way into the morning.

The light promises a good day, a freshening season. No Black Friday for us. We are after sunshine and ice-skating, the three-mile trip downtown (yes, we can handle that, we suburbanites), and a little more family time.

A Glimpse of Home

A Glimpse of Home

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“Here before me now is my picture, my map, of a place and therefore of myself, and much that can never be said adds to its reality for me, just as much of its reality is based on my own shadows, my inventions.”

from Map of Another Town: A Memoir of Provence by M.F.K. Fisher.  

On my way home from the funeral Saturday, I stopped for a moment to snap this shot. It is a view of downtown Lexington from the parking lot of St. Paul’s Church, where Tom and I were married. I turned my head and there it was, this vision of old Lexington with the bright sun overexposing the steeple and the red brick rectory shining by its side and the late autumn foliage adding a spot of color on the left.

Seeing my town from this unconventional angle I see also the old towns of Europe, their cobbled streets and ancient airs, all the living that went on within their walls, the stones somehow absorbing this life and reflecting it back to us centuries later. 

 Surely when we talk about place we talk about all the living that goes on within the cities and the towns and buildings, and our noble — and ultimately futile — struggle to hold onto what passes too quickly through our hands.
Devil May Care

Devil May Care

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It’s the first Saturday in May, a day to drink mint juleps, sing “My Old Kentucky Home” and watch the horses run. Strong storms are predicted for Churchill Downs, which means that Devil May Care, a filly whose owner my parents met last weekend, will have to run well in the mud to win the 136th Kentucky Derby. I hope she does, because of the faint connection, because she’s a girl and because I like her name. (This is the, ahem, highly scientific method by which I usually choose a horse.)

Devil May Care makes me think about going for broke. It’s the rakish tilt of a fedora, a whiff of cigarette smoke, the swirl of bourbon in a highball glass. In a world of highly regulated outcomes, chance draws us like a magnet. Who wants to know how every race will end? Who doesn’t long for surprise? When the track is muddy, it’s more likely that you’ll see a most improbable horse, a long shot, perhaps a filly, streaking along the rail or swinging wide on the outside. The cheers will be deafening, the mud will be flying and a horse, a horse whose name we don’t yet know, will be running her heart out, racing for the finish line.