Down Memory Lane

Friday 10/26/12

It has been a busy several days, but everything we could do has been done. Aside from the physical labor of going through everything to ensure that there were no hidden envelopes (found one) and packing up the books we were going to take, the bulk of the labor was deciding what might be junk, what might be personal family effects, and just generally helping the executor as much as and however she wished. One thing Ken was able to do was contact the appropriate people in the Amateur Press Association and help them load up the club’s stuff that Guy was storing. When Guy’s camera and computer finally came, I checked his email addresses to make sure we hadn’t missed contacting any group and copied his photos to my hard drive for Ken to look at later. We had already scattered Guy’s ashes where he had scattered his wife’s several years earlier.

So today we went sightseeing down towards Cincinnati. If you don’t count a drive-by on I-75 in 1993, I hadn’t been back there since leaving in 1982. First up was my ex’s and my first house. The area was almost unrecognizably changed. The Voice of America antenna farm across the street was gone and it looked like a pricey sub-division was going in. Our house had been altered quite a bit and was for sale. Going to the listing gave me the opportunity to see the mods done on the inside, too.

Then it was over to the apartment complexes Ken had lived in at that time. I remembered the first one, but drew a total blank on the second. The area was looking pretty run down now – I don’t remember it being that way in the late ‘70s.

Lunch at the Century Inn. I had never eaten there (didn’t eat out much at the time) but it has been in business since 1806. Surprisingly (or not) Ken ran into somebody he knew.

From there we went to the GE plant we both worked in and drove around the parking lots. Quite a change from our time; it was practically empty.

Finally we headed down to Union Terminal. Naturally we had to park some distance away since the day had turned cold, blustery, and rainy. Inside was quite pleasant tho. Union Terminal is now a museum complex. We bought the combo ticket and arbitrarily chose to go first to the Natural History Museum. It was very good but the Cincinnati History Museum was even more interesting to us. Alas, we had to skip much of it since we were running out of time. We had dinner plans and needed to get back.

So back out into the even heavier and colder downpour and into the I-75 rush hour traffic. It was really slow going all the way back.

Sorry for the lack of pictures, but I didn’t think to take my camera out. After all, how do you photograph a memory?

[written 12/12/13]