The first house I bought in Lexington was a block away from Castlewood Park in the 1980’s. This neighborhood was home to me. I grew up off Meadow Lane, played Little League baseball and basketball in Castlewood Park. The basketball court then was in the Louden Castle, now home to the Lexington Art League.

In the eighties, I was doing a lot of summer theatre in Woodland Park, and with Dr. Jim Rodgers at UK…and I was bicycling to rehearsal many nights. Pedaling through these Northside streets also felt like home. Growing up, my friends and I biked everywhere and all the time. There were long summer days when we were up and rolling by 8am and still rolling strong at 10pm. Our parents didn’t worry about it since all the parents on the street kept half an eye on all the kids. Every kid’s house was a refuge from weather, hunger, or the calls of nature.

We were excellently-equipped to face our world. We had baseball cards flapping and snapping on the spokes of our wheels, and when the sun went down we had soft drink cans. We had perfected the technique of stomping on the middle of empty cans in such a way that as the can was crushed, it curled around and clung to the sole of our sneaker. Thus shod, we would mount our bikes, attain the speed of light, and drop the lethal sneaker to the asphalt. The night would come alive with streaks of sparks and screams of burning metal…followed instantly by the wails of the neighbors.

Clearly, the offended neighbors were unaware that America was great then.

So…there I was in the 80’s, twenty years older, back in the neighborhood, biking those streets again.

Now though, I was biking alone at night and no one was watching or listening. The residents were self-sequestered in their air-conditioned nests with cable TV. The streets were silent. I was invisible. How cool is that?

However, part of my ride to rehearsal each night would take me through what I came to refer to as the “NACZ” – the no air-conditioning zone. The difference was stark. In the NACZ I was not invisible, I was a participant once more. People sitting on their porches would greet me. I could hear their conversations. The windows were open. I could hear their phones ringing and could hear what was on TV. I loved it. On those “dark, warm, narcotic American nights” (thank you forever for that description, Tom Waits) I once again became a ten-year-old Prometheus on a 5-speed with a beverage can clamped to my sneaker ready to leave a trail of sparks and screeches and devastation to the dismay of my parents and neighbors out on their porches.

Of course I didn’t actually do that now.

I was a responsible adult now…

…riding a bike to a place where I would spend the evening pretending to be King Arthur, or Don Quixote, or a murderous barber, or a pleasant man with an invisible bunny for a drinking buddy.

Also, my mom had thrown all my baseball cards away.

Yeah…

…that was it.