Not all abuse is physical. Some is the result of psychological warfare. For 42 years, I seemed to be receiving coded messages that something was wrong. They came from seemingly likable billboard ads, pop songs and TV comedy skits. The queasiness, t...
About one year after stumbling upon the Briggs obit, I was seated in the rental office of an apartment complex in a tree covered, sedate Louisville neighborhood called Clifton Heights. The soon-to-be roommate and I were filling out the applications as one of the co-landlords touted the apartment buildings, as "in good condition for being 28-years old."
This was 1995, placing my new home's origin in thatyear. Not to worry, this time, however.
Immediately, I loved Clifton Heights. Doves' cooing and leaves' rustling were seldom covered up by traffic sounds, yet the neighborhood was loaded with apartment complexes and small houses.
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The feel of Clifton Heights as I remember it
The main commercial road's traffic was light compared to the packed upscale restaurant districts nearby. That leads to another reason I was fascinated with Clifton Heights – whereas the food outlets were basically Pizza Hut and Dairy Queen, this place was culturally diverse where it counted.
My neighbors were from China, Brazil, the Caribbean, Thailand, Mexico, Czechoslovakia, Cambodia, Somalia, Iraq -- and even Atlanta! Without fanfare, this neighborhood of such culinary and architectural unpretentiousness was a pathfinder for the multicultural Louisville that would arrive in a dozen years.
Among residents from longtime U.S. families, around 30 percent were black. This eclecticism in Clifton Heights went unheralded, while neighborhoods in our city most credited as "diverse" in the 1990s were judged that way because of their coffee, used bookstore titles and jazz performances.
During the four years I lived in it, Clifton Heights quietly displayed Louisville's multi-racial near future -- and the fruition of the city's great 1960s Open Housing struggle, borne out in the neighborhood's mix of middle income blacks and whites, many of whom were workers in a large food-packing district close by.
Oh yes, I should add that the city's long debated Open Housing Ordinance had been passed in 1967, after Martin Luther King Jr. led a march here for it (I have heard stories of awe over his courage and moral strength from two Louisvillians, both white, who were in that march). Maybe the idealist in me liked living in such an integrated place so much that the normal MCMVXVII queasiness was tempered.
Who would have guessed that in addition to all his wonderful victories for his own people over hate and denigration, MLK helped soothe my stomach for four consecutive years?
Another reason living in Clifton Heights was good for me was that the mix of future and past I have marveled at in this writing gave me buoyancy in a gargantuan struggle to complete the grieving process following the death of Mom, which had happened a dozen years prior.
That's a long time to have separation anxiety over the loss of Mom and our home, and the inability to close it out left me emotionally disoriented in time.
Clifton Heights, where I lived alone in that apartment during most of my four years there, offered me the uncanny chance to feed my dual emotional needs to embrace my past and still move on.
While on quiet walks to the grocery, watching TV in my living room or gazing at the spectacular four seasons of beauty out my rear picture window, life's ethos was just like my growing up, which was done in a considerably similar neighborhood under tall trees populated by tireless squirrels and vocal tree frogs.
On the other hand, the diversity of the secluded immigrant enclave of Clifton Heights said to me, "The future is here -- and hey, it's the kind of future your liberal family wanted to see."
The future wasn't obliterating my beloved home in my past. It was taking me right back to it, in a way that let me move on in emotional health!
And would you believe it -- it was that allusion to Nineteen Sixty-Seven on my first day in Clifton Heights that opened the way for this healing.
Still, it was that year -- the year that meant something unsettling. Something sinister and yet alluring. Something I still could not identify.
And when I would walk through my apartment complex amid its debonair autumn-colored contemporary buildings framed by tall, gently swaying trees, it would be both that moment and 1967.
