Thu 5 Oct
We went to Paducah to find the old homeplace, and I couldn't find it!
But first...we went to find a place for breakfast. Two places had biscuits and gravy on the menu, and I wanted some. But I passed up the first place to go back to the second, called "The 50's cafe." I ordered the special but asked them to hold the meat--it was supposedly biscuits and gravy, two eggs and meat. But what they brought me out was "biscuit and gravy". One stinking biscuit!
I should have immediately asked for another one or sued them for false pluralization. But it was a very good biscuit and excellent gravy, and while my eggs were undercooked I survived the meal.
We ate in Calvert City, so we returned to the motorhome for a short Molly walk and then headed out to Paducah. Did I mention it was alternately raining and drizzling the whole time? I was already dripping wet when we set out, and I wanted to park in downtown Paducah and walk the length of Broadway to fifth street and back in search of the old Kresgies building that was my first job site.
But the place where Ed ended up parking was the lot at the farmer's market across from the Market House Theater. So basically, the riverfront. For reasons unknown I left the umbrella in the car and so we walked the street and back in the rain. My raincoat has a plastic liner, so my skin didn't get wet, but my hands, feet and phone camera sure did.
I couldn't figure out which was the Kresgie's Building. If I'd pinpointed the address up front I probably could have...most likely it was this one:
Looking at the 10-story building
Up Broadway,
Down Broadway, toward the river,
Lots of cool old stuff, and lots of unfamiliar stuff:
I think this is the building that used to be The Variety Store, where we got our comic books and then later, our used paperbacks and record albums.
Finkels! Loved it but couldn't often afford to go there. I may have gotten the work boots that I used for my Desert Ecology field trip in college there. Probably--it used to be hard to find high-topped work boots in women's sizes.
Floodgates at the river,
Then, soaking wet, we went up to Monroe street and circled around the block. I honestly could not find the homesite from the Monroe Street side. There was a house on the corner where I think the previous house burned down? Or not. I forgot to look for Gina Davis's house across the street but I don't think it was there, because if it had been there, I would have seen it. It had a huge stone front steps and a basement underneath.
So we drove up and down and across and then came down Jefferson Street. There, at last, things looked familiar. I hopped out of the Jeep (in the rain) and walked across the big field that was there for most of my childhood after they tore down the houses that used to be across the alley. Then when I stood on the alley behind my house, I could see it as clearly as if it still stood. It had been replaced by a grassy lawn and a metal building, but it was still there as strong in memory as if I'd never left.
With my eyes, closed, I saw the two elm trees that succumbed to Dutch Elm Disease. The black locust. The driveway and the metal shed that Dad and I erected. The old wooden shed that we tore down. The angled bricks that lined the driveway, where I'd meticulously transplanted violets for several years until they bloomed purple cheer every spring and thick green leaves all summer. The garden that my brother (or was it me?) rototilled for her.
Looking down the alley toward 11th street
The fenceline between our house and the Pate's house,
Our backyard, from the alley looking toward Monroe Street,
The oak trees in the field behind the house,
The three big oak trees in the field across from our house (Jefferson Street side) were still there and just as big and strong and healthy as to make your heart glad. Those trees must be 250 years old by now, and they're majesties!
And I could kind of see the back porch where we spent so many hours, playing or sitting in the evening to hear the sun go down...the gourd vines Ma planted one year that ran un strings to shade the porch and sprouted so many squash beetles that she never ever considered growing them again. There was an apple tree she planted by the back porch and a patio of bricks that Dad laid. It was us kid's jobs to transplant moss in between the bricks and to yank up dandelion plants when they sprouted, but we complained a lot and never did a very good job. I think there was a brick path around to the garage, too.
Then the house, with dark green siding. The back door opened into the kitchen; off to the left was a family room--although if I remember right, they moved the rooms around occasionally and in the end that one ended up being my parent's bedroom. A hall went straight down the center of the house, but I don't remember it very well. I was pretty young when they divided up the hall into closet space and put a central furnace in the middle closet.
On the right of the hall (starting at the back door) was my bedroom and then my brother's bedroom at the front. In between them was a stove in the old days before we got the furnace. There was a closet in the corner of my brother's room, backing up against the wall of my room, and there must have been some unused, walled up space next to it where the stovepipe vented. Maybe a chimney used to be there originally, but that would have been before we moved in.
And all those years of playing in the yard, eating beans and cornbread at the kitchen table, reading kids' books and acting them out with paper dolls and plastic toy horses, and then reading teenage books and eating pizza from Dairy Queen. Christmases; Birthday Cakes; Mom in her headscarf and bermuda shorts; Dad in front of the TV, complaining that they never showed local news. So many years; so many memories it would take me as many years to write them all.
And all so long ago.
Dinner at Patti's. Don't do this again. It would have had to be a lot better than it was to be worth the price they charged.
