Edito(u)r

This one, or that one?

I asked myself this question continuously as I drove around Louisville with my kids this week. This story or that one? Every corner, building, and shop in my childhood neighborhood holds multiple memories. Rolling down the road with the easily-distractable, I had to be fast and discerning about my folklore choices. Is the story interesting? Age-appropriate? Worthy of interrupting back-seat daydreams? As quick as the flick of turn signal, I edited my life.

My son and daughter can tell you I made some bad calls. The old Ehrler’s Dairy on Norris Road where an eighth-grade cheerleader bought me ice cream? Unexceptional. The stone wall along Milvale Drive where I got into a fender bender just a week into my learner’s permit? Age inappropriate; requires exposition about stages of obtaining a driver’s license.

I scored a few hits, though. The children took a long look at Belknap, the elementary school where I attended first through third grade. “See, it closed when I was a kid just like your school closed. But the building’s still here being used for something else. You’ll be able to go back, too.” Given my kids’ recent obsession with Korean food, I decided to point out the office building where Lee’s Restaurant once was. “The lobby of that tower was where I first tried BeeBimBop.” I ate up their “Wow!!”s.

To my surprise, what the children most wanted to see were scenes of the macabre. Like Civil War buffs, they sought out the exact spots where dramatic events in my childhood transpired. Over the years, while tending to their scraped knees, I’ve told my kids stories of my family’s fails. “Guess whose Mommy crashed her bike into a sign when she was a kid, too?” I’ve said while untangling my child from her Schwinn. Sharing top billing among the fail tales are when 1) my brother fell and dislocated his elbow at age nine, and 2) the neighborhood tyrant smacked me in the eye with a banana peel he’d tied to the end a rope. I’d been trying to keep the tour on the up and up, but they wanted to visit the battlefields where we’d bled.

Though I’ve been to Louisville many times since college, it’s rare that I’ve been back in warm weather. Except for Christmas, summertime is the ripest season for memories. When leaves fill out the branches, you can distinguish the maple from the oak. You know it was exactly this tree you climbed to to spy on kissing teenagers. With the car windows open, you catch the scent of the bourbon distillery that defined your bus ride across town during desegregation.

My five year old son cried the last night of our visit. “I don’t want to go home,” he sobbed. A canary in the coalmine, his sadness alerted me to my own. After the kids were asleep, Joe stayed and worked while I walked down Bardstown Road in the descending light. I peered inside each quirky shop and tried to imagine myself living in Louisville now, in my current incarnation as a wife, architect and mother. I am not nimble; I struggle with change. But if I pretended to bend, could this be my grocery store? Could that be our school? Kentucky or Virginia? This one or that one?