Tag Archives: Gratz Park

Fixed Foot

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“Not all those who wander are lost.” –J. R. R. Tolkien.

I have friends who are currently wandering in the Champagne region of France, and unless they’ve been oversampling the local product, they are far from lost.

But wait…

The legend in Champagne is that the blind monk Dom Perignon exclaimed upon his first sip of the local sparkling product; “I am drinking stars!” Perhaps my friends are currently lost in the stars. I hope so.

They have wandered for as long as I’ve known them. Sometimes Janie and I have wandered with them. We’ve been to Chicago, Charleston, San Miguel de Allende, and Ocracoke (home of the murkiest clam chowder at which I’ve ever looked………looked, mind you). Over the years, as my “fixed foot” (thank you for that description David Dick) increasingly dominated my own wanderlust, the opposite seems to have taken hold of my roaming friends. They want to go. They want to see. They want street corn.

Street corn…

I understand champagne, Rodin, Montmartre…

I sorta understand buttes, Musso & Frank’s, the Cowboy Museum (how many times?)…

But this desire for street corn?

It plumb evades me.

But whatever geological, gastronomical, or artistic tugs they follow, they are never lost.

They may start each day with a vague notion of where exactly they’re going, but I’ve never known them to be lost. They wander in search of wonder.

I admire them.

I don’t wish to be them.

I travelled a goodly amount the last five years I worked for a living.

If you scramble the letters in the words; “business travel,” it spells “anathema.”

For me;

Alaska was cabbing to meet with delightful, hopeful, caring people working to improve neighborhoods full of homeless, compromised…hopeless people, who at each long night’s borning retreated to wilderness improvised camps to survive. Montana was landing at an airport where my fellow passengers knew the airport personnel by name…I didn’t…but the alcove in the hotel with three slot machines was cute. Tampa was a casino hotel. Boston was snowy, then snowy, then snowy once more. Washington was useless…three times. Biloxi was a hotel casino in the midst of concrete slabs whose houses had been leveled by the last hurricane de jour. Alighting on broken landing gear after dark in the midst of sirens and flashing lights in Chicago. Landing at a sub 10-degree 2am Bluegrass Field because the pilot wasn’t comfortable with his equipment and returned to Atlanta for a different plane.

No champagne…

No street corn even.

No wonder.

I remember an afternoon in 1972. I was landing at Bluegrass Field after a trip to Chicago for an audition for a summer acting job. It was stunning. Keeneland Racetrack was running. Everything was an impossible palette of shades of green. The white fences of Calumet Farm were stark and invigorating. I precisely remember thinking; “What the hell am I doing? THIS is where I want to be.”

I think that day I began to work towards a goal; to build a sustainable life Lexington.

Working towards that goal actually led me to forget that goal. It took that three years of “business travel” to remind me of what and where I wanted to be.

I’m here now.

My fixed foot is firmly and happily planted.

I have not left a search for wonder behind.

When I battle trumpet vine for sovereignty in our back yard, I revere the tenacity and enthusiasm of my foe. It is wondrous.

When a new, roaming frog in the family way leaves a slimy fertile contribution to our tiny lagoon. I find wonder, and start accumulating names for all the anticipated tadpoles.

When I sit on the back deck of my friends in Nonesuch and find myself sunami-ed in wonder by the Milky Way and the lightnin’ bugs.

When I drive on the Old Frankfort Road and admire the wonder of the paddocks speckled with field ornaments, aka thoroughbred horses.

Stone fences.

Gratz Park.

Breakfast at Josie’s.

Every morning I awake knowing I don’t have to pack, and drive to the airport, and funnel through security, and wrestle with the overhead rack, retrieve luggage, hail a shuttle or taxi, check in to a hotel…

Instead, get a cuppa coffee, do the Wordle, drift in to the living room and join Janie and Chloe the Wonder Dog on the couch to read the morning paper………completely wondrous.

Pedestrian glories?

You are welcome to think so.

I don’t.

I wouldn’t object to some of that champagne though.

Fire Truck (Revised)

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Now before I start ramblin’, all you fact-checkers, and score-keepers – just let it go.

Relax.

This little tale has been pressed through a 50-year-plus filter of memory. If it’s not perfectly factual and accurate…as the very fine Kentucky songwriter Mitch Barrett puts it; “I ain’t lyin’, I’m tellin’ you a story”.

Besides, it’s not like I have the codes to our country’s nuclear arsenal or anything.

This is simply how I remember it.

I’ve related the story Groucho Marx told of how he ended up in show business;

“I saw this advertisement in the newspaper for a job. I needed a job. I ran 6 blocks and up 3 flights of stairs and I knocked on the door. This fellow answered the door wearing lipstick and a dress. I thought; ‘How long has this been going on?’”

I suspect most theatre participants have had a similar moment of truth (or deception).

I know I had several. This is one.

When I was in high school, I had a part time job in the children’s department of the public library in Lexington. At that time, the library’s main (and only) branch was in what is now known as the Carnegie Reading Center in Gratz Park. I would finish my school day at Bryan Station High School, walk over to the junior high building (middle school not having been invented then), and catch the city bus for a 35-minute ride to my 70-cents-an-hour part-time gig at the library. Did I also mention that it snowed every day and the roads all ran uphill – coming and going?

I loved the job and I loved being in the Gratz Park neighborhood.

The bus would drop me at the Apothecary (not drug store, mind you – apothecary) on the corner of Market and Second, usually about 30-40 minutes before I was scheduled to start my shift. The Apothecary was next door to the original Morris Book Store. Occasionally, I would peruse the book store. Mr. Morris himself special-ordered for me my hardbound editions of THE LORD OF THE RINGS in 1968. But most of the time, I would slip downstairs to the Apothecary and get a bag of chips and a coke and slink through their back door and down the hall to a strange little subterranean chamber in which resided a parrot (or macaw or dodo…or whatever) on a guano-ringed floor stand. I never knew why the bird was there. It didn’t respond to questions. There were also stacks of story magazines in the room. No, not porn, just story magazines. I would feast on my chips and coke and reading material under the baleful eye of the parrot (or macaw or dodo…or whatever) until it was time to cross the street to the library. It all sounds so exotic today – not so much then.

On my lunch breaks I had options. I could throw my frisbee in the park until Mrs. Gratz (for real!) came out and explained that her-husband-had-given-the-land-to-the-city-and-frisbee-throwing-was-not-what-he-had-in-mind-and-how-come-my-hair-was-so-long-if-I-was-a-boy. Or, I would walk down to Brandy’s Kitchen on the corner of Main and Lime, step over the Smiley Pete (the town dog) memorial, and get a $1.35 daily special. This was my introduction to chicken-fried steak. I never knew exactly what a chicken-fried steak was. It didn’t respond to questions either.

At nine o’clock, I would catch the bus home unless my mom came down to give me a ride home. Any excuse for mom to visit the library was legit.

My duties were sometimes tedious, but mostly heavenly. I would shelve the returned books (restricting myself to only reading every other one), assist the “kiddie-lit” students from Transy, and listen to the children recite their reading adventures so they could gain credit in their “Busy Bee Reading Club”.

I fear it was during this period that Dr. Seuss, Walter Farley, Carol Kendall, Hugh Lofting, and Enid Blyton became more important to me than Milton, Coleridge, Byron, and Shelley (Mr. or Mrs.).

One afternoon, my assignment was to read and tell a book to several Head Start classes visiting the library. It was a rainy day. Thus, I think there were 80+ kids in that session. I read the story and then selected several kids to act it out. There weren’t nearly enough parts for all the kids. There were two six-year-old boys on the front row who were raucous in their desire to participate. (RAUCOUS PARTICIPATION IS ENCOURAGED – wouldn’t that be a great title for someone’s biography?) I pointed to one of the six-year-olds and asked him if he could play the fire truck mentioned in the story. He roared; “YES!” and began to wail his “siren” and wave his arm as a ladder. His partner and lifelong friend (six years old, remember) was crushed to be left behind. I asked him what color the fire truck was. “Ray-udd!” he shouted, and with my extraordinary but certification-lacking linguistic dexterity I immediately interpreted that as “red”. I asked if he could be “red”. He leapt to his feet, stood next to his fire-truck-playing friend, made “jazz hands”, and danced frantically around his friend.

The room and I went graveyard silent in sheer awe and admiration.

That was a Groucho Marx moment.

“How long has this been going on?”

At that moment, I wanted to grow up to be that 6-year-old.

I still do.