AN AFTERNOON AT JOE'S

By J. Trace Kirkwood

Recently, two of my best friends and I met with our friend and mentor – a retired algebra teacher named Troy Lovett – for lunch at a restaurant called Joe’s. Joe’s is in Lyndon, which is one of many little satellite suburban cities that ring the City of Louisville. A cold and gray November rain washed down on the streets and sidewalks of the suburban town and stole all the color from the houses and buildings and trees. It felt colder than it was, and the rain felt like it fell harder than it really did.

When we entered Joe’s, we all shook off the cold and the wet. I didn’t give the impromptu luncheon any chance of being more than a quick meal and a series of oaths to get together again before a few more of our hairs turned gray. We all seemed tired. Russ, a salesman, checked messages on his Blackberry. Todd, a journalist, seemed pre-occupied with his next assignment, and Mr. Lovett was mentally preparing for a math class he teaches at a local college. I was worn down from being at a convention in downtown Louisville where I had to meet with a succession of local politicians from around the state. It was fun but fatiguing. I’m not even sure if I’m classifying the feelings of my friends correctly because I may have projected my fatigue onto them.

I grew up in Lyndon. My family moved there from Miami, Florida, in 1972, and I was just a little boy. We lived on a dead end street just east of the little town that still maintained its own identity – far enough from Louisville for residents to still write “Lyndon, KY” in the addresses of our mail. Farm fields and large tracts of woods still existed just east of where we lived and left over asparagus and other vegetables sprung up in our yards and fields, a ghostly reminder of the truck farms that once were located where the first seeds of suburban sprawl had taken root.

Lyndon had its own grocery, hardware, gas station, elementary school, five-and-dime, and bowling alley. It even had a post office, an Ehrler’s Ice Cream Shop, and a Mario’s Pizza at the corner of Lyndon Lane and LaGrange Road.

My mother sometimes sent my sister Mary Kay and me to the store to pick up some ingredient she forgot to get while buying the week’s groceries. Mary Kay was 15 when we moved to Lyndon, and she was 5’10” tall with long and straight blonde hair. On our walks to “Downtown Lyndon” I had trouble keeping up with her striding gait.

To the terror of my sister, we had to pass a little shack of a bar called “Joe’s,” which was on the north side of LaGrange Road. We always walked along a concrete sidewalk on the south side of the highway. It was an awful looking dump of a place that looked like it had once been a nice little house. Two big trees stood out in front of it, and the partially dead branches were filled with green tufts of mistletoe, which were even visible in the summer. The gravel and dirt parking lot went right to the door of the shack, and a patch of grass was under the two big trees. Picnic tables were placed helter-skelter in that patch, and there were always a group of rough looking men sitting on them drinking beer – butts on the table tops and boots on the benches.

Every time we walked past that place those men hooted and hollered and whistled at my poor sister – awkward at 15 and uncomfortable with her height and her looks. I felt sorry for her, and I always wanted to run across the highway and slap those men upside their heads. As soon as it was possible she and I ducked behind the Lyndon Fire Station and continued on a shortcut to the grocery. Mary Kay always just told me to ignore them.

Joe’s was always an intimidating place with equally intimidating men loitering on those old crappy picnic tables. They seemed to never change. Mary Kay, however, got her driver’s license and no longer had to endure their hooting and whistling and lewd comments from across the road. Other girls from our neighborhood took my sister’s place, but those men were always the same. I knew their vehicles, and I knew their voices.

When I was about 12, our neighbors had a “block party” in the driveway in front of their garage. In the planning stages, they decided to buy a keg of beer, and they charged my father with retrieving the big aluminum barrel and bringing it to the party. I went with dad and had no idea where someone went to get a keg of beer. When he pulled his big ole Oldsmobile into the gravel parking lot at Joe’s I was surprised and a little scared. It was Saturday morning, so the usual crowd of unshaven desperados hadn’t taken their roost on the picnic tables in the grass.

Dad got out of the car and motioned for me to come with him. I trembled at the thought of going into Joe’s, and I was convinced that a group of men would meet us just inside of the door and do us harm. Somewhere in my mind I heard Charlie Daniels singing “Uneasy Rider,” and anytime I hear that song I picture the Joe’s in Lyndon around 1975.

“Kinda a redneck lookin’ joint
Called the Dew-Drop-Inn”

I followed dad through the door of that place as if I were a hostage following a captor. At first, I stayed very close to his side to the point of irritating him. The inside was dingy, lit only by a light behind a short wooden bar and the windows across the front. A few dirty tables were scattered in a small sitting area in front of the bar, and a colorful collage of liquor bottles stood behind it. I looked through the windows and had a different view of my little town. I had other angles on the same old buildings. The woods across the highway seemed thick and dense, and the little cinder block fire station looked like it was by itself. The buildings looked old and the big trees out front kept me from seeing very much. For a second, I imagined my sister, Mary Kay, walking the sidewalk on the other side of the highway, and I imagined her goofy toe-headed little brother racing to match her stride.

The bartender loaded the beer keg into the back of dad’s car, and we pulled out of the parking lot with the limestone rock groaning beneath the weight of that Oldsmobile. I looked back at the squatty little house, which had been kidnapped and made into a bar, and felt like I had crossed some threshold between childhood and adulthood.

Joe’s underwent a transformation in the years after 1984, when I left Lyndon. They cut down the old dead trees, made a large addition on the rear of that old house, and paved the parking lot. The picnic tables, I’m sure, were chopped into firewood, and the beer drinking rednecks were all shooed away to either climb into their coffins or roost at some other seedy tavern.

When my friends and I decided to get together for lunch near where Mr. Lovett has an office, we decided to eat at Joe’s. I thought it would be interesting to lunch not at an old haunt but at an old place that haunted me.

I’m not going to recount our conversation that day, but it was one of those times when friends get together and build their friendship by talking, listening and laughing together. In terms of friends, Russ and Todd and Mr. Lovett are both old an new. I don’t know them from the days of childhood in Lyndon. I know them from college, and we started our friendships during those goofy years at WKU in Bowling Green, where I now live. We’ve flourished as friends through the trials of careers, starting families and marriages, and as we’ve stepped down from the stage of our youth. Our world has changed, but the fraternal love we have for one another is steady. We’ve been friends for more than two decades, and afternoon’s like the one we spent at Joe’s makes me realize that we’ll be friends for the rest of our lives.

My friends from my Lyndon days are still around, but different interests and careers were too much for childhood friendships. We broke apart, yet I still love each and every one of those old friends and neighbors, and they played an immeasurable role in my life. They’ve evolved into short phone calls and Christmas cards, though. I miss those careless childhood days I spent with those guys and girls from my old street. I still feel a bond to them, but the stage lights have faded on them. It is comforting that they are still around, but I don’t think a lunch at Joe’s would result in a moving two hour long conversation.

When we concluded our lunch that day to go off into our different directions I felt as if two very important parts of my life converged while sitting in the once seedy and redneck infested confines of Joe’s Bar. I looked through the front windows of Joe’s, just as I did all those years ago when my father still drove Oldsmobiles and still had jet black hair and was unafraid to walk into a juke joint with his little boy. This time I saw a world that had changed. The woods that once stood are now an office building and a hot tub store. The Lyndon Fire Station is a massive brick edifice, and the old grocery store has been torn down and replaced by a glitzy, neon-lighted drug store.

Yes, the Lyndon of the 1970s is all but gone. It is not as sad to me as one might think. The world changes and there is little we can do to stop it. Buildings and streets and sidewalks crumble and succumb to the blade of the bulldozer, but if we put our faith in those that we love, the world and its temporariness is unimportant. The dreamy days of childhood lured me while at Joe’s, but I am thankful to be able to stack the lasting friendships I have today onto the ones from my childhood.