Crossing the Bridge

I got my first root canal this week and in the middle of the procedure, the dentist asked why my name sounded so familiar. Fuck, I thought to myself. I know where this is going. My mouth was strained and covered with a blue stretchy cloth and some other medieval contraption that looked like animal bones glued together to help keep my mouth ajar. 

 

“Are you K--- C--- daughter?” she asked.

 

“Uhhh huuuh,” said my throat muscles.

 

Even crossing the bridge from Louisville, Kentucky to New Albany, Indiana I am not immune to my family’s legacy. 

 

“I used to live in the Highlands and hadn’t heard of your family’s restaurant until a friend told me about it.”

 

I made a sound indicating that I was still listening and unable to actually communicate. Why dentists are not trained in school to not ask so many fucking questions when the patient cannot use their words is one of life’s great mysteries I guess.

 

“There was a café too, right? Or am I making that up?”

 

Thumps up. 

 

“What was the name of the café?”

 

Are you fucking serious?

 

I tried to explain that I couldn’t tell her right now but maybe when I didn’t have all this shit in my mouth. Of course, I sounded like the teacher from Charlie Brown with a dick in her mouth. 

 

As soon as the root canal was finished and the chair was raised she asked about the name of the café. I told her and made polite small talk about she used to go there frequently during her residency. As I stood up, she told me her cousin who was from here but lived in Switzerland was sitting in the lobby and could she introduce me to her because her parents used to eat at the restaurant all the time. 

 

“Sure, not a problem.”

For those who know me well, I don’t particularly enjoy these conversations. The unpleasant two-stepping of questions like, “Did they name the restaurant after you?” or “What’s it like to have a restaurant named after you?” I was thrown a curveball just minutes after my root canal when this stranger asked what kind of food they served at my parents’ restaurant that closed its doors in June of last year. 

 

“I’m not sure how to answer that,” I said. 

 

She then proceeded to ask why I didn’t take over the business and what I did for a living. I obliged and made sure to tell her that I got a Master’s degree in creative writing. Of course, then she asks what kind of writing I do and it seemed like this conversation was never going to end. Why did I feel like I had to defend myself to a stranger? AFTER A ROOT CANAL? This felt on par with running into an ex-boyfriend in the waiting room of my therapist’s office two years ago. 

 

On the subject of roots, it is difficult to describe here when it’s like to walk around a city like Louisville and strangers know who you are and your family history. Am I a person or a caricature? As someone who clings very closely to her autonomy, this city has often felt like a battleground. Even close friends expect that I have watched cooking competition shows like Top Chef because of where I come from or perhaps because of my brief career as a professional baker. I can proudly say I have never seen an episode of Top Chef, except for the one my mother was briefly on. 

 

I have been foraging to create my own path but there will always be hurdles. In reading Lilly Dancyger’s memoir Negative Space, about her relationship with her artist father, among other things like grief, addiction, art, and memory, she discusses a conversation he had with her about making sure that work (the money) doesn’t interfere with the art. How easy it is to let the energy that work takes from you so you don’t have time for the art. I have thought about this a lot lately. Especially on Friday as I was in a rage waiting for my produce truck that didn’t arrive until 45 minutes after I was supposed to leave for the day. I grew up in this life, sitting in broccoli boxes and riding in our cherry red station wagon that smelled like all the parties my mother had been catering the weekend before. Here I am again, this time as a single thirty-six-year-old woman. Back in fluorescent lighting and plastic gloves smelling like sweat and roasted vegetables pretending not to live in someone else’s shadow. 

 

I don’t know how else to tell you that there is so much more to who I am.