On a beautiful Sunday afternoon, after examining some of the seven young people seeking confirmation as members of our church and celebrating their confirmation in the morning and after dropping Vincent off at the home of one of his classmates, for the calculations for the Kentucky Kingdom physics lab project - a classmate who lives on the north end of Shively, that once all-white suburb where Carl and Anne Braden's home was firebombed (see "Crossing the Divide") (and back up Dixie Highway past the old Brown-Forman complex and through the West side California neighborhood and Old Louisville on Kentucky Street - for the first time ever), I skipped volunteering for the Clinton or Obama campaigns at Stephanie's request and - on the eve eve of our 10th wedding anniversary - we belatedly visited the Butchertown art fair - on the grounds of St. Joseph Catholic Church - an old neighborhood near my old Phoenix Hill neighborhood and near the Louisville Bats game then going on - and then walking around the neighborhood - including seeing a cute recently remodeled one-story house (at its open house) on the river side of the flood wall in Butchertown (on a slightly more upscale block of the neighborhood than the block - pictured above top - where I looked at houses/apartments for myself four years and two weeks ago). We then drove through downtown and then through the Portland neigborhood, a white, working-class West Side enclave whose residents blocked the renaming of 22nd street as Martin Luther King street. We drove up 22nd street to the river to a park on the far side of Interstate 64 (across 64 from the old Marine Hospital), where Stephanie used to drive to work every morning on the way to Mt. Tabor Elementary School. At the park we watched as coal barge trying to leave the lock area and go up river up the Ohio River foundered until a second tug boat came to rescue it. By the time we left the two tugs were still trying to push the barge up river. We then drove through more or Portland, including past a Catholic church founded for a French community there in the first decade of the 1800s (here we were probably 10 blocks north of the Braden Center), and then onto tree-lined Northwestern Parkway, which became a beautiful black middle-class neighborhood of old homes, homes that resembled those on Eastern Parkway or Southern Parkway, where we had left Vincent last night at a Sweet 16 Party. Just as there had been some Hillary Clinton signs in the near south end neighborhoods near Churchill Downs on the way to Vincent's classmates and no political signs in Portland, in this area north of Shawnee Park, there were lots of Obama signs. Shawnee Park was packed, although we drove near a house that we had driven by before when it was for sale. We continued to note for sale and for rent signs throughout. Driving south on Southwestern Parkway, we left the old Louisville city limits and then drove on or near Cane Run Road, sticking also near the Ohio River throughout. We'd been driving along the river the whole time, but the river swings around in an incredible arc until it's flowing due south with southern metro Louisville/Jefferson County on one side and Harrison County, Indiana, with its coal-fired electrical power plant and casino, on the other. When we were in Portland and Shawnee, New Albany, where Stephanie teaches, was on the other side of the river. Back in Butchertown, Jeffersonville, Indiana, was on the other side of the river.
Off of Cane Run Road is a massive, sprawling port, industrial, and distribution area. We drove by a Marathon petroleum storage/distribution area which is we believe the one Stephanie's uncle has visited for his job. We drove into a cute park along the river. After driving for a good nother half an hour, we found ourselves at what I had intended as one of our original destinations, Mike Linnigs, a legendary, old, and sprawling seafood restaurant (pictured above bottom) along the river, which my hairdresser, Becky (see "Interview, haircut, and prom planning") , had told me about. It was not a good Weight Watcher night, with lots of seafood, but at least Stephanie and I had a salad and split a seafood platter. It was getting rather late now, although Vincent assured us that he and his classmates were still working. It turns out that his classmate's mother had also fed them friend chicken, green beans, fried apples, and pasta salad, which evaporated any guilt we might have felt about not bringing Vincent fish to go. So we drove on Cane Run Road to Dixie Highway and up past Valley Station and Valley High School, where my co-worker/former turtle sitter was the 1981 salutatorian (and where I had taken Vincent to another classmate's Sweet 16 party, some two years ago). In some of Portland and Northwestern Parkway and all the way from south of Shawnee Park to Dixie Highway, we were in areas in which I'd never been (except for a very short stretch of Cane Run near Vincent's classmate Michael - who was working on the physics project back in Shively - who I took home once) we were driving places I'd never been. But I had been on Dixie Highway - the road that stretches south of Broadway as 18th Street then through Shively and Pleasure Ridge Park, then all the way to Fort Knox, through white, lower-middle-class parts of the county - several times. But Stephanie had never been here, so we drove past the Dixie Dozen movie theater, past an abandoned Chinese buffet restaurant where I ate exactly four years ago on the way from Macomb to Louisville to Florida and then back to Louisville to start my job and past the abandoned Dillard's and the Watterson Expressway, around 7th street and the half-abandoned old Florida Distillery plant and back to Vincent's classmate's house. Although it was already past 9 p.m., we chit chatted with Vincent's classmate and his mother, as other classmates left, then drove up Dixie Highway and Broadway - past the remains of the briefly opened inner-city movie theater where "Ali" premiered - and then on familiar roads home to St. Matthews, where the dog (and turtles) awaited us. I felt a little bad because except we would have had to leave him in the car while we ate, Frisco could have gone with us. In honor of our former frog companion animals, we did not eat the frog's legs on the seafood platter at Mike's. We thought it was apropos that two days before our wedding anniversary, we had a kind of anniversary dinner at a seafood place along the Ohio River in Kentucky called Mike's, because - at Nancy's suggestion - just after getting married, the two of us plus Vincent and Courtney had a wedding day lunch - 10 years ago - at Mike Fink's, a seafood place (and steamboat) on the river in Covington, Kentucky. And so we'd come full circle (though we had to get gas just before getting home, because by now we'd probably driven 60-70 miles). Though we didn't get to campaign, we got a great view of metro Louisville diversity - starting with the fact that Vincent has classmates in his school - a citywide magnet school located in the center of town - from all over Jefferson County. That's good for diversity but sometimes sends us far away when he visits classmate's houses.
Off of Cane Run Road is a massive, sprawling port, industrial, and distribution area. We drove by a Marathon petroleum storage/distribution area which is we believe the one Stephanie's uncle has visited for his job. We drove into a cute park along the river. After driving for a good nother half an hour, we found ourselves at what I had intended as one of our original destinations, Mike Linnigs, a legendary, old, and sprawling seafood restaurant (pictured above bottom) along the river, which my hairdresser, Becky (see "Interview, haircut, and prom planning") , had told me about. It was not a good Weight Watcher night, with lots of seafood, but at least Stephanie and I had a salad and split a seafood platter. It was getting rather late now, although Vincent assured us that he and his classmates were still working. It turns out that his classmate's mother had also fed them friend chicken, green beans, fried apples, and pasta salad, which evaporated any guilt we might have felt about not bringing Vincent fish to go. So we drove on Cane Run Road to Dixie Highway and up past Valley Station and Valley High School, where my co-worker/former turtle sitter was the 1981 salutatorian (and where I had taken Vincent to another classmate's Sweet 16 party, some two years ago). In some of Portland and Northwestern Parkway and all the way from south of Shawnee Park to Dixie Highway, we were in areas in which I'd never been (except for a very short stretch of Cane Run near Vincent's classmate Michael - who was working on the physics project back in Shively - who I took home once) we were driving places I'd never been. But I had been on Dixie Highway - the road that stretches south of Broadway as 18th Street then through Shively and Pleasure Ridge Park, then all the way to Fort Knox, through white, lower-middle-class parts of the county - several times. But Stephanie had never been here, so we drove past the Dixie Dozen movie theater, past an abandoned Chinese buffet restaurant where I ate exactly four years ago on the way from Macomb to Louisville to Florida and then back to Louisville to start my job and past the abandoned Dillard's and the Watterson Expressway, around 7th street and the half-abandoned old Florida Distillery plant and back to Vincent's classmate's house. Although it was already past 9 p.m., we chit chatted with Vincent's classmate and his mother, as other classmates left, then drove up Dixie Highway and Broadway - past the remains of the briefly opened inner-city movie theater where "Ali" premiered - and then on familiar roads home to St. Matthews, where the dog (and turtles) awaited us. I felt a little bad because except we would have had to leave him in the car while we ate, Frisco could have gone with us. In honor of our former frog companion animals, we did not eat the frog's legs on the seafood platter at Mike's. We thought it was apropos that two days before our wedding anniversary, we had a kind of anniversary dinner at a seafood place along the Ohio River in Kentucky called Mike's, because - at Nancy's suggestion - just after getting married, the two of us plus Vincent and Courtney had a wedding day lunch - 10 years ago - at Mike Fink's, a seafood place (and steamboat) on the river in Covington, Kentucky. And so we'd come full circle (though we had to get gas just before getting home, because by now we'd probably driven 60-70 miles). Though we didn't get to campaign, we got a great view of metro Louisville diversity - starting with the fact that Vincent has classmates in his school - a citywide magnet school located in the center of town - from all over Jefferson County. That's good for diversity but sometimes sends us far away when he visits classmate's houses.
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