Good morning, dear reader.
It’s two hours before sunrise, and we’re preparing to leave our hotel, a sub-standard Hampton Inn, passable but the weariest of all our stays of the past four months on the road. Fifteen minutes ago, in a ragged patch of unkept grass, not so much a lawn as a field in waiting, I was beset by youthful memories.
I’d like to tell you that we were bathed in starlight, but instead, it was in the lonely burn of the yellow lights of a Waffle House across the parking lot. A lone diner was seated at the counter with a cup of coffee in front of him and his head in his hands. I found myself wondering if he had yet to be home from a Saturday night or if he was beginning his Sunday.
We are in Indiana headed for Kentucky, and the last time I ate at a Waffle House was when I was a student at the University of Kentucky over forty years ago. Back then, when I was full of beer, trouble, and mischief, the restaurant chain was a thing of wonder to me. Waffles, at any time of day, seemed like an impossibility to one growing up in New England. What fun!
When the bars closed in those far-off days, I’d find myself in one of two places. The first was the Waffle House, eating in happy, drunken bliss with my friends. Far too often, we did the silly dine-and-dash thing. There’s no way they could stop twenty college students from leaving at once while one person stopped to pay.
What cads we were.
The other place I frequented was far more reputable. It was along a stone wall under the trees on Lexington’s 5th Street where the hookers waited for their Johns.
I loved those ladies, but not in the way you’re thinking.
Even back then, I enjoyed seeking out the most genuine folks, and once I heard there were hookers in that fair city, I was enthralled. From a geekish, squeaky-clean young man from a small town, hookers seemed dangerous and exotic. A roommate, Rocky from Alabama, paid them a great deal of money many a Saturday night. While I waited outside for him, I eventually began conversing with the ladies of the night. What fun it was, and how much I learned from them.
“Boston, you want to know how to please a woman?” Minnie, a gap-toothed black woman with a blond Tina Turner wig and swaying breasts under a thin summer dress, asked.
(Everyone called me Boston in those UK days, from football and basketball stars to governors and hookers.)
Gwen, one of her “co-workers,” leaned in, returned the bottle of peach schnapps I’d handed her after she swallowed a mouthful, and said, “Pay her!”
With that, the gaggle of ladies of the evening, every single one of them as dark as the hour, exploded in uproarious laughter under the trees near yellow streetlights.
I did not visit them every Friday and Saturday; there was the Waffle House, after all, but I did often enough that when I pulled up in a University of Kentucky athletics van somewhere between midnight and 1 am, they’d shout out my name like I was walking into a congregation to be saved.
They were my friends, and I was young, silly, and eager to learn. They taught me to fade into the night shadows when a car pulled up looking for late-night company. They told me sex stories about their strangest, loneliest, and most boring clients, who ranged from college boys like me to a Hall of Fame college basketball coach, which, in Kentucky, was more important than the President of the United States.
“Yolanda’s boy,” they called the famous coach. “But he don’ pull up here. He too good for that. His state trooper comes in an unmarked car, picks up Yolanda, and brings her to room six of the Continental Inn. Every Tuesday night, ‘ceptin in basketball season. Then, it’s whatever night they don’ be playin’ a game. One time, the cop, he show up after the coach was at a night church service, dropped off his wife, and needed some real religion. Yolanda, she showed that man the Lord!”
This morning, I smiled in the glow of those memories and the Waffle House lights.
I did not learn much in college classrooms because I was lazy and didn’t care about what they were teaching. But how I learned from countless ‘professors’ away from campus.
When it’s my birthday, I tend to look back and reflect on birthdays past and where my life has taken me. Sometimes, I still feel like that fellow in his early twenties, standing with Minnie, Yolanda, Gwen and the other ladies, still excited and curious about where all my next years will take me. Back then, it always felt like I was living a life where I was just beginning a book, and the pages contained my future.
This morning, I’m still wondering where the next chapters will deliver me.
We’re currently in Corydon, brought here by the love and friendship of Maury and Kim, who had us out to their home on the hill for dinner last night. Kim made a sumptuous ratatouille over quinoa. I made Jane and Ann Esselstyn’s Sweet and Savory Brussels Sprouts and Shane & Simples Smokey Bacon Flavored Hummus. It was a grand and comforting night.
Our original itinerary had us driving to Pepper Pike, Ohio, from here, for a few days with Jane Esselstyn and Brian Hart, and Ann and Caldwell Esselstyn. It’s not too often you get to meet the people who helped save your life!
With Samwise’s mysterious ailment, that changed, though, and instead, we are driving to Lexington, Virginia, for several days in the company of Rachael Kleidon and her family.
It will be a long day on the road, made longer by three quick stops in Kentucky. The first two are in Louisville, where Thomas Merton, the author and Trappist monk, had his streetcorner epiphany about his love of his fellow humans, and then to Bellarmine University and the Thomas Merton Center. It won’t be open, but I wanted to visit the statue of Merton that stands out front.
We’ll drive south from there, adding two hours to our route, but it will be worth it to visit Merton’s grave at the Abbey of Gethsemani.
Our route won’t take us through Lexington, Kentucky, but if it did, we’d stop on Fifth Street and say a prayer for those wonderful and colorful women of my past. (We stopped there a few years back on a trip, but the place was changed and cleaned up, and it looks boring in comparison. I mourned for what used to be.)
Sometimes, just typing my plans, I get excited all over again. How lucky am I?! And now we are off!
I hope you are well this morning, and since it’s my birthday, please have a waffle for me if you are so inclined.
Here’s to birthdays past and, God willing, those ahead.
Onward, by all means.
PS: A reminder that all new annual subscriptions and gift subscriptions will go toward animal rescue this weekend. I won’t take a cut, and you’ll save 15% off the regular rate. Click on either link.