A Run for the Roses (Part 2)
[Second of a three-part post.]
“Turnin’ back the pages to the times I love best,
I wonder if she’ll ever do the same…”—Gordon Lightfoot, “Carefree Highway”
The road was miles away.
I couldn’t even hear it from where I was—in a new land with familiar and wonderful people. The road might’ve kicked up a stink—what with me being so idle—but I didn’t care. It would just have to wait.
The sun was rising on Kentucky Derby Day: Saturday, May 1, 1993.
The journal sets it up: “I awoke [on Bud and Ellen’s] couch around 8 AM but fell back asleep with the ceiling fan overhead blowing cool floral-scented air all around me.” It was so peaceful I dozed until the phone rang and the answering machine kicked in. Bud’s brother Chris was calling to get details on the Derby Day party later that afternoon.
We arranged to have lunch first with Bud’s parents, driving to his mother Faye’s antique shop at the Loop off Bardstown Road. “Bud’s dad Charlie was there and we all chatted, and then Chris [showed up] with his little daughter Hilary (nearly all of five now) then followed by his sister Beth and her new son Ian (a baby of a few months) [and] her husband Tom. We all walked across the street in the hazy sunshine to the Loop Deli and ordered sandwiches, salads, iced tea and lemonade.”
It was as far from the road as you could get—surrounded by friends and extended family. I seem to recall a pool nearby, with children laughing and splashing in the water. Chris’ daughter Hilary “played with her hat and everyone [was] admiring the baby Ian and catching up on news and joking at Charlie’s expense.”
To crib from Randy Newman, it was a “real nice way to spend the day in Louisville, Kentucky, on a lazy Saturday afternoon in 1993.”
“Now the thing that I call livin’ is just bein’ satisfied, with knowin’ I got no one left to blame.” —Gordon Lightfoot, “Carefree Highway”
By 3 p.m. everyone had convened at Bud and Ellen’s for the Derby Party and the Run for the Roses on TV. Ellen’s youngest sister Lynn showed up alone, as the journal states, “I saw her come up the lane to the door in the spring light…” and Faye burst through the door uncharacteristically “asking for a beer.” Once the party was in full swing, the Birkett side of the family had arrived and young Hilary “had taken a shine to me. Lynn coddled Beth’s baby boy Ian and I remember thinking how lovely it all looked—though my guess is that Lynn is still frighened by the looming domesticity of the whole scene. I think it’s The Future, inevitable but certainly not hopeless.”
It’s interesting because, from this distance, the lens is less in focus than it appears. It might’ve been me who was “frightened by the looming domesticity” and I wasn’t quite ready to sharpen the lens on myself. Who knows? But my reaction to reading the journal entry feels exactly right.
Ellen played a song by an Iowa City duo that had us all laughing, titled “I’ve Been in a Funk Ever Since My Wife Went Punk,” and Lynn put on some music while we waited for post time: The Jayhawks’ Hollywood Town Hall and some stuff by the Cowboy Junkies, along with Van Morrison’s “Tupelo Honey.”
I’m sure I had the biggest grin of that spring on my face.
“You can’t stop us on the road to freedom, you can’t stop us ’cause our eyes can see…” —Van Morrison, “Tupelo Honey”
The road might’ve meant freedom, but right there, right then, I couldn’t have wished to be anywhere else.
“We all watched the Run for the Roses around 5:30,” states the journal, “when Race #8 came up … I made a reference to the fact that the whole thing was like life and sex: too much expectation and over way too soon.”
As history will affirm, Sea Hero won that race, “the horse I drew at random from a coffee can [into] which Bud had put cuttings from the newspaper listings … and a few of us sat outside as the sprinkles of rain came down on and off, and minded the grill with its hamburgers and hot dogs.”
As the booze flowed, talk veered in every which direction: “…here we were drinking beer and bourbon and smelling the air and perfume—god, and the talk from ’68 Chevys to Dennis Hopper to horses and politics.”
Lynn left the party at 7 p.m., vowing to return. When she didn’t, we all took off for dessert at the Blue Bird Café on Bardstown Road, where “we had coffees, espresso, cheesecake and other dessert. It was nice. The waiter was pleased with us because we were nearly the only sober patrons he’d had all night.”
Then the journal makes an observation right in the midst of that memory: “Jesus, if I think about it, I’m old.” It was an odd remark to make when I was not yet 34.
The following morning, Sunday, before my return trip northward, “Ellen expressed disappointment to Bud in the kitchen (while I was in the dining room) that Lynn couldn’t have joined us at least for dessert…”
“I had to agree.”
Completely in the Dark 