are we there yet? (no.)

The Karma Cafe in Louisville, Kentucky, where we are currently waiting for our food, has punk rock kids for waiters, and the Amazing Grace health food store across the street makes it feel like we are in a cool city.

Again, I must point out the difficulty of finding places to log on and keep-up this blog. And time is a factor, too, since I feel like we have been on an amazingly efficient and ambitious schedule. Our trip to Seneca Falls was fascinating, although the old woman with her two daughters on pink leashes that wandered through our tour distracted us from our tour-guide's politicized narration of the National Park. Crossing the border into Canada was blessedly easy for us (I was told to keep my mouth shut), and the falls are, of course, spectacular (the tour guide did not know how many dare-devils died after plummeting over the edge in a barrel). But Niagara reminded me of any built-up tourist place, with too much noise and See The Incredible Endless Maze! and Hard Rock Cafes littering the landscape. Hank and Melanie and I finally settled on a touristy, but not-too-crowded Mexican Restaurant for late-night drinks (which struck us all as an uncanny experience of borders). The restaurant (which I think was called Tacos and Tequilla, or TNT) had, on its walls, painted caricatures of Mexican men with bottles of booze and guns and Mexican women with large breasts. We drank a lot of Canadian beer at the Mexican restaurant.

We left Niagara and travelled to Columbus, Ohio, but first stopped in Mansfield to check out the Ohio State Penitentiary, which was opened in the mid-nineteenth century as a reformatory for wicked boys, and finally closed in 1990 (after have been deemed unfit for habitation in 1970). It is modelled after European castles (to frighten the boys, according to the architect), and so incredibly dank and dilapidated inside, it reminds one of a horror film. If you've seen The Shawshank Redemption, you have seen parts of this prison, since it was filmed there in the mid-1990s. A video by Godsmack was filmed in one of the cells. The amount of peeling lead paint was over-whelming, and the two-hour tour included a trip to the roof and guard tower the overlooked the other prisons adjacent to the one we were in. Currently, both prisons (one max security and the other intermediate) are overcrowded.

There's not much to say about Columbus, and I want to skip ahead to last night's arrival in Louisville, since it was here that Hank and I met, for the first time, Melanie's Aunt Pearl, who is a 74 year old woman who welcomed us into her home. Pearl and her daughter Amy took us to a lovely dinner, and the conversation about art, religion, politics, decarceration, Moby Dick, and The 400 Blows lasted for nearly six hours. More cousins showed up when we returned to the house, and we sat and drank beer and enjoyed a conversation about Jewish atheism. We were all impressed when Pearl claimed that a belief in a watchful God was "bullshit."

The other cool thing was the presence of tiled murals created by Melanie's semi-famous Uncle Harold (Melanie's great-uncle, by blood on her mother's side). Harold's mosaics appear on the house, inside the house, and cover an entire bathroom wall. In addition, Harold's mosaics appear in the Jewish Community Center, and at other various locations in and around Louisville. He is Kentucky's "only mosaic artist," as one report I read claimed. The mural at the JCC was an incredible memorial for the Holocaust inspired by the work of Salvador Dali, so that the historical event is rendered as a fluid (but, of course, tiled) shifting from bloodshed and death to survival, community, and life. It was enormous.

I want to write more, but now my breakfast is cold, and I know others want to get on-line. Today we head to the Maker's Mark distillery, and then down to Nashville.

By the way, kefer is fermented milk, kind of like yogurt. We've been eating it with Grape-Nuts, honey, and blueberries.