Chicago and Louisville October 18-22

On Friday morning October 18 I flew from Rome to Chicago. As soon as the plane touched down in Chicago, my cell phone received the SMS messages that Ivana had sent me the previous day in Rome, along with messages from my Jordanian cell phone company welcoming me to Rome – the delay being an artifact of incompatible technology.

I stayed Friday night in Hyde Park with Fred Donner, my former PhD thesis advisor, and had dinner that evening with my friend and colleague Iman Saca and got caught up with her news.

On Saturday October 19 I spent the day at the University of Chicago. I put in a few hours of work in the Oriental Institute Archives library and picked up at the Seminary Coop Bookstore a copy of Nirad Chaudhuri’s famous Autobiography of an Unknown Indian; I will be meeting his son Prithvi during my trip to India in November. That evening Fred Donner gave me the lowdown about an early Arabic papyrus document he had recently found in the Oriental Institute collections.

That night I took an overnight Greyhound bus from Chicago to Louisville. The trip took seven hours, including a long stop in Indianapolis. Greyhound offers free wireless internet access in the stations and on the buses, so I spent much of the trip browsing the internet.

The bus arrived at 7:00 am on Sunday October 20 and my friend and colleague Karen Britt picked me up. She is the Byzantine Art History professor at the University of Louisville and our paths have crossed in Jordan and in India.

Karen and her husband Barry put me up in a three-story house down the block from their house in Old Louisville. Later that morning Karen and I walked around to look at the houses in the preservation district of Old Louisville where they live.

 
 

 

Karen and Barry in front of their house

 

At 1:00 pm I went to the gathering of relatives and friends in memory of my aunt Mary Hilton, who had died in September.

Mary Hilton was a younger sister of my mother and had spent her career as a biochemist first at Johns Hopkins University and then at the University of Louisville Medical School. Our paths rarely crossed – last in 2006 – and it had been decades since I had met some of my cousins. So recognizing that this would be an excellent opportunity to meet my mother’s relatives led me to decide to make the trip.

 

Fritz Hilton (Mary’s husband) speaking at the memorial gathering

The next day, Monday October 21, I went with Karen in the morning to the University of Kentucky campus where I spent a couple hours in the library. That afternoon I went with Karen and Barry to the nearby Falls of the Ohio nature area, where some fossil-bearing rocks are exposed.

 The fossil-bearing rocks at the Falls of the Ohio nature area

That evening I had dinner with the Hilton relatives again, including one cousin who lives in France whom I may not have met since 1967.

The third day, Tuesday October 22, I went to the University, where I had arranged to meet the daughter of one of my cousins, who is a student there. Then in the afternoon Karen and I walked around the downtown Louisville area. An oversized replica of Michelangelo’s David statue along with red penguins on the roof of the adjacent building was a strange sight.
 

The David statue and the red penguins

An unfriendly no-parking sign on the wharf

We saw the exhibits of the Fraizer Museum, including an excellent temporary exhibit about Napoleon. That evening Karen and I had a long conversation about Byzantine mosaics, before I took the overnight bus back to Chicago.

The bus arrived in Chicago at 4:45 am on Wednesday October 23 and I hung out for a few hours before going to the University of Chicago campus, where I browsed in the Oriental Institute Archives library for a while and chatted with people. In the afternoon I went to the O’Hare airport where I got a bus to Rockford, arriving at 4:00 pm. I checked into a hotel for the night, as I have done several times before, since there is no inexpensive way to get from Chicago to Dubuque other than the once-a-day early morning bus.