A friend sent me an email with an invitation to see a play; I was unable to get tickets to the play, but her invitation was two-fold, and included a “meet for coffee” at the Heidelberg Café.
I’ve known Karyn and her husband, Dave, since we three worked together at the St. Louis department store, Famous-Barr. We’ve remained friends through the years and have all landed in the Indianapolis area. I have visited with them, met their three kids and gone to a football game at Dave’s alma mater, Purdue. Karyn is an artist who is, at present, a stay-at-home mom, and part-time water aerobics instructor at the Fort Ben Y. Inside the Heidelberg, Karyn inquired after her “springerles,” a German biscuit with embossed designs, and we caught up over cheese Danish, pecan roll and coffee. We were excited to see each other and in our eagerness to tell of the lives we’d lived since our last gathering, our conversation tumbled over itself like two happy puppies.
Karyn’s friend, Celeste Williams, had been a writer for a newspaper and wrote the play; “More Light: Douglass Returns,” is an “imagined conversation” between the freed slave and abolitionist, Frederick Douglass and William Roberts, a member of a community of “free people of color.” Though unable to see the play, I told Karyn that I was intrigued by the location in the play: The Roberts Settlement. My first bride’s family is from Noblesville; her great-great grandfather, John Hord, fought in the Civil War. My genealogical research into her family has not unearthed John’s address, and I wondered if it was likely that he lived with others like him in an African-American settlement. Karyn gave me a copy of the play’s program and suggested some names to further my research.
Karyn told of a trip to Clifty Falls State Park and a visit to Southern Indiana with her daughter’s Girl Scout Troop to see The Falls of the Ohio. Noting my ever-present camera on the table, we mused about the possibilities of teaching “f-stop, shutter speed and depth of field” to her troop. I told her of my long visit to my home town of Pittsburgh and recommended that she take the kids to see the new exhibits at the Indiana State Museum. She had heard that the old L.S. Ayres clock was to be restored and I showed her a picture of a similar clock on the historic Kaufmann’s building in Pittsburgh. We laughed about Karyn’s tale of reading Moby Dick to 6th graders in a religious school and the potential difficulty of explaining what Queequeg meant when he told Ishmael, “we’re married.” And of course, we talked of the books we’ve read and loved, and Karyn gave me “My Ideal Bookshelf,” a graphic for one to fill in “the ten books (we) can’t live without.”
After a recent in-home medical exam, the nurse certified my good health and asked for recommendations. I told her that I try to eat in a healthy way, I walk for exercise and make an effort to be in the company of others. In Karyn’s company, I told her that I had forgotten to mention to the nurse what I felt to be another important contributor to my health: the presence of music, always. This got for me, from my friend, recommendations for new music.
Karyn and I parted with a duplication of our greeting hug, with no certain date or time to meet again, she with two small bags of springele biscuits and me with the small, quiet joy of having had a good conversation with a friend.