Charlie Dittmeier's Home Page
This week I had a FOURTH flat tire! I was close enough to home that I could push the disabled bike back but then I had to take it to the bike shop because replacing a tube on this e-bike is really complicated. It took two guys to get the 62 lbs. bike up on the rack. Then the tech could look for the puncture and put in a new inner tube.
Louisville is a really beautiful city, something I am becoming more aware of and am enjoying more since I returned from Cambodia and started riding my bike through neighborhoods I never knew before. Today I had a 28-mile ride from Nazareth Home Clifton where I live to Iroquois Park in South Louisville where I used to live. Here is a photo on one of the lookouts in the park. Basically all you see is trees but under those trees are 150-year old neighborhoods and city streets. The city is green, not barren suburbs (we have those, too).
Iroquois Park is one of five parks inside the city which were laid out by Olmsted, the celebrated urban planner who designed Central Park, a masterpiece of landscape architecture, in New York City.
When I was born in 1944, my father was still in Germany in WWII. He never saw me until he came home when I was 2 years old. We lived in an apartment on South 4th Street in the Old Louisville neighborhood and I believe this is the building. I have only the vaguest recollections of our first family home but this is the only building on the block that I remember that matches my mental image. We lived here for a couple years and I remember Dad’s buddies from the war coming by.
Gone are those days, 70 years ago, when I would flip my bicycle upside down and change a tire or tighten the chain or oil the gears there in the backyard. Today my rear brake–hydraulic, like on a motorcycle–was not working properly so a bike tech had to bleed some air from the brake line with special tools and relevant experience. My brakes work now but it cost me $20!
I have been amazed at the architecture I have rediscovered in Louisville since my return here, partly because it’s common place and I just took it for granted before, and partly because I’m now riding everywhere on a bicycle and see things more closely and from different angles.
Yesterday I went to get a city bus pass and the TARC offices are in the old Union Station where the L&N Railroad was based. It is a beautiful, distinctive building in downtown Louisville.
Greetings…. I’m still feeling my way along as a I readjust to Louisville and the US of A. Today’s The Record has my column about my experience. For those who might be interested, here is the link:
I moved to Nazareth Home at the end of August but I’m still not fully moved in. I still have papers to separate, some boxes to unload, and places that I need to find for various items. One on-going problem has been the bright afternoon sunlight coming into the living room/mostly office I’ve tried to create. Looking at computer monitors with a bright window beside them was tedious. Earlier I put up some curtains in my bedroom to block an extremely bright security light outside, and then today my sister Mary and her husband Mike helped me put up another set of curtains in the office. What a difference that makes!
Today a group of our cousins had lunch together and Marilyn gave us an old photo from 1928 showing four of the Dittmeier uncles in their youth. I was especially happy to see this early photo of my dad, Charlie (on the right).
This afternoon I took my bicycle out for a short ride to Kroger’s and had my first flat tire. I’ve been anticipating it and wondering about the timing and where I would be. Fortunately it was only two or three miles from my home. I called my super biker brother-in-law who also has a truck and he picked me up and we took the bike to the shop where I bought it because I have never changed a tire on a bike with a motor in the hub. It’s going to be expensive to let them fix the flat but I’ll learn what needs to be done. Mike’s wife, my sister, has a twin bike like mine and Mike called her and she agreed I could borrow her bike till mine is fixed so we went to their house in the truck and picked it up and brought it to Nazareth Home. That’s it above, some funny shade of pink–or is it purple? Or is it….? Whatever the color, it rolls so I’m fixed for a few days. Thanks, Mary!
