Nicola Caroli

CNF – Week 5  – Jefferson Street 2 Rewrite – Bob Metry

Bob resumed his trek along East Jefferson Street on a chilly Sunday morning in early October 2009.  For two cycles of the traffic signal he stood in the First Street crosswalk in the glow of a half-risen sun, where just a few weeks before in rush hour traffic he had stared down the sprucy lady in the shiny black BMW.  She had seemed willing to run him down so she could race to her reserved parking space in a high rise parking garage three or four blocks away.  Or so he had imagined.  He smiled.  No need to rush to the curb today. much improved beginning

Where he had lived as a small boy a vapid Hampton Inn, eight stories of white stucco, pink brick and flat aluminum framed windows, stuck out of the ground in the middle of a grey concrete car park, tufted here and there with islands of live greenery.  An air of sterility accentuated the building’s dowdiness.  It brought to mind a giant saguaro cactus rising from desert sand and scrub he had seen near Tucson, Arizona years before.

He remembered a bustling commercial block of narrow storefronts, brown and red brick buildings joined like Siamese siblings by party walls or separated by narrow passageways, sidewalks lined with wood framed produce stands, painted a uniform dark green, satellites to the retail stores. His father, Morris, had owned a meat market there before being drafted into the Army and shipped out to England in 1942.  Where his brother, Habeeb (named for his maternal grandfather), was born in 1943.

Depending on the season, the weather, the day of the week and the time of day, there had floated on the air the aromas of fresh or rotting fruits and vegetables, wood and coal smoke from 50 gallon drums stoked to keep the vendors warm, cooking oil and kitchen grease from restaurants, waste flowing in the curbside gutters, and motor exhaust.  Today he inhaled only the combusted fuel vapors hanging above any busy road.

Most vividly he recalled the people.  Lots of people of all kinds. His people.  His family. Shoppers. Sundays would have been this quiet, though.  One thing hadn’t changed.  No one who didn’t live there came down there on Sunday.  Except today no one lived down there.  Just visitors staying in hotels like the Hampton Inn.

Armed with a Kodak EasyShare digital camera (fully charged, loaded with a fresh two gigabyte memory card) and fortified by a large cup of Starbucks extra bold coffee, he set out to document the real present, which he planned to contrast with a recollected (idealized?) past.  A few snaps of the Inn, some of the jeans and hoodie clad guests, checked out and schlepping luggage to their vans, SUVs and compact Japanese cars. He wondered why they had come to Louisville.  Why they chose to stay in this particular hotel.  Convenience?  Economy?  Proximity?  Tempted as he was, he decided not to ask.  It was not relevant to his story, was it?  Maybe yes, maybe no.  Certainly not part of the mission he had set for himself. the self reference is weak

He conveniently, perhaps perversely, parked his Toyota at the curb exactly in front of the main entrance.  That’s where the family car might have been left overnight sixty-odd years ago – in front of 109.  Close enough to where the long obliterated address might have been.  It was a symbolic, if not precise, placement, staking out a bit of turf.

Planning to start at First Street and walk the five blocks east to Hancock, Bob had driven past the cleared and half developed ground in the 200 and 300 blocks, the new and soon to be completed construction of 400 and 500 East.  A contemporary version of the depression era housing projects they replaced filled both sides of the 400 block.  The Wayside Christian Mission stood at 432, where St. Michael’s Syrian Orthodox Church stood until razed in 1960. The Church, a converted synagogue, bound the community together for nearly thirty years until moved to the eastern suburbs.  Here his immediate and extended families worshipped and joined in social activities.  Many of the men – butchers, grocers, tavern keepers, restaurant owners, produce vendors – the future patriarchs whose faith and dollars purchased the building in 1934, met almost daily in late afternoon to play dominoes or card games, usually pinochle, hearts, rummy or a variation of Jacks.  The rhythms of commerce dictated their leisure.

Germany and Japan defeated, his father, a member of what we now call “the greatest generation,” had returned to Louisville and a postwar down turned economy in late 1945.  Not finding permanent employment or a good business opportunity, in June 1946 Morris packed mother Malvena, the three boys: Bobby, Ronnie and Habeeb, and Grandfather Habeeb into a new maroon Chrysler Royal, bought with savings from poker winnings and Sgt. Bilko like enterprises garnered in his role of Mess Sergeant, and headed for California.  He was following the trail his parents had blazed before the War, looking for a business opportunity in the Golden State.

There followed a six-month family grand reunion on Morris’s father’s fruit ranch near Fresno, where grew table grapes, plums, peaches, almonds and apricots.  The older grandchildren, none over fourteen, picked ripe fruit and, trusted to wield hook-bladed knives, cut grape bunches from the vines, which they either placed in baskets or laid out on flat trays to dry into raisins.  Nine-year-old Bobby managed to cut himself twice before being relieved of duty and assigned to spreading the raisin trays.

At one time or another Morris’s three brothers and two sisters, their spouses and children, together with sundry kinfolk, gathered either as visitors or part of the clan that had earlier fled west and settled either in the Los Angeles area as entrepreneurs or in the fertile San Joaquin Valley. The Lebanese thrived as merchants or as farmers continuing the agrarian traditions brought from the fertile fields in the mountains above Beirut.  Working for a wage was rarely an option.  Disappointingly, prospects in California were slimmer than in Kentucky.  Common dust, not gold pavers, layered the streets and highways.  January 1947 saw tracks retraced across the nineteen hundred or so miles of two-lane road through Arizona, Texas, Arkansas and Tennessee, mostly along legendary Route 66, back to Jefferson Street.

Back to Jefferson Street, the magnet.  Bob’s maternal grandmother, Selma Karam, had bought the building at 317 East, in front of which her produce stand stood and would stand until 1959 when the building, the stand and all the buildings and stands would be razed in the name of urban renewal.  Upstairs, Selma, her husband, Habeeb, and son, Eli lived in five rooms.  As did Bob’s family for a while.  The twenty-five street level front feet of 317 East became Metry’s Meat Market on one side and Karam’s Produce, run by Eli, on the other.  Morris was back in the meat business.  The Haymarket district still boomed.  The Church grew into an even greater force in the family’s life, just a block away now.  Grocery store on one corner.  Barber across the street.  Five and Dime six doors up.  Life was neat and compact.

The images in Bob’s mind dissolved in the reality of a chain link fence caging the remains of Produce Plaza, the “new hay market”, a square block developed to replace the original after 1959, after Bob’s 300 block had come down.  Now, cracked acres of asphalt and chipped concrete spread from Floyd to Preston, north across Congress Alley to Market Street, bereft on this Sunday morning even of commuters’ vehicles parked there during the workweek.

With a sigh Bob recalled recounting the history of the three north side blocks between First and Preston to a thirty something Vice President of the University of Louisville involved with developing a Medical and Research Center in the adjacent 200 block.  In response he got a weak, indulgent smile, a cock of the head to one side, hands buried deep in gray pin striped suit pants pockets, an impatient sidewise shuffle of shiny black-loafered feet.  The unspoken message: Old man, I don’t care what was there.  You just don’t understand progress.

Straight backed, index finger itching to jab the tidy puffed up buttoned down shirtfront, Bob might have replied:  And you, my myopic friend, don’t understand that activity is not always progress. Again it would be better to lead us into making that conclusion ourselves rather than spelling it out

Bob’s Jefferson Street existed no more.  Intellectually, he grudgingly accepted the successive changes as well intended, essential for the city’s modernization, and probably inevitable.  Emotionally, he struggled with thoughts of the culture, the humanity he believed had been lost.  Connecting cords, stretched and worn thin with time, still held him fast to the street and the city, however. His heart stayed tethered to its home base, even as his body and its constituent senses had journeyed out into the world. when it comes to making your point you become general, commenting rather than finding a situation, images etc that make us feel what you feel.

Unlike him, two of his brothers, Ronnie, who succumbed to abdominal cancer just past his fifty-fourth birthday, and Joe, seventeen years younger and a career high school special needs teacher, took permanent root in the city.  Ronnie had owned and operated the Brass Rail Tavern, corner of Jackson and Jefferson, succeeding their father, who had switched trades when urban renewal took the meat market, and moved two blocks east.  That building stands no more, the lot now for resale by a land developer.

As well, his eight first cousins who grew up in Louisville, the children of his father’s brothers, married, settled, and worked here.  In one way or another, through St. Michael’s Church, having lived or worked on the street, each of them had ties to Jefferson Street.  His cousin Raymond, slicing a ham, contributed the tip of his right index finger to the sawdust of Morris’s butcher shop at 317 in 1955.  In the ensuing commotion the severed flesh was not recovered and was presumed interred in the day’s sweepings.

Two of the cousins and brother Ronnie already were buried in Louisville, as surely and finally as Bob’s Jefferson Street.  Only brother Habeeb, aka “Hub”, settled away, all of seventy-five miles away in Lexington, his life still centered on “Big Blue”, the University of Kentucky.  Into his 60s he remains an unreconstructed Yuppie:  Brooks Brothers suits, chinos, button down oxford shirts and penny loafers – no socks.  Yet his ties to family and the ancestral church remain strong.

Bob had traveled to Louisville that first weekend in October for the Saturday wedding of his niece, Kristin, brother Joe’s older daughter, Hub’s goddaughter.  Having finished his Jefferson Street odyssey, he was going to join Hub, Joe and dozens of other family members at the home of his sister-in-law Margaret, Ronnie’s widow.

Before going to his car, however, Bob thought it fitting to use the men’s room, as both a biological necessity and a therapeutic homage.  Among the antique photographs lining the lobby and hallway walls he looked in vain for images of the neighborhood, finding only classic Kentucky Derby scenes:  Churchill Downs, thoroughbred horses, beautiful people.  No connection there.  With a shrug of mild disappointment, he headed out the lobby doors to the street.  Oblivious, preoccupied with thoughts of what he had – and had not – experienced that morning, he ignored the guests gathering out front to leave.

“Uncle Bob!”  He turned around instinctively, not expecting that he was being called.  “Uncle Bob, did you forget us already?”  His niece, Kristin, a broad smile lighting up her beautiful newlywed face, grabbed his arm.  Her new husband, Keegan, and Keegan’s brother and best man, Kyle, joined her in chiding him – gently and lovingly, of course – for passing them by.

“Did you stay here last night?” he asked.

“Yes.  We’re going to Dad’s and then to Aunt Margaret’s.”

“You don’t know why I’m here?” Bob said.

“No, but I was wondering.”

He briefly explained his exploration of the family’s past, then tied Kristin into it.  “Your Uncle Hub was born right here. In the 1940s we lived in a building at 109 East Jefferson Street, just about where you’re standing.  You can tell him and your dad about it.  I’m sure they won’t remember.”

These last words he said tongue in cheek as he threw his arms around his niece and her husband in a bonding embrace.

Driving away, Bob realized that he must not let his past encumber the present or impede anyone else’s future.  Recalling the lessons of Thomas Wolfe’s “You Can’t Go Home Again,” read more than fifty years ago, he resolved his new mission would be to bind the Jefferson Streets of yesterday, today and tomorrow together and not seek reasons to keep them apart.

it seems like you have come to realisation through the process of writing – which is great. it still feels a more of a thought than a feeling, the next step would be to embody that attitude