Dee Felice Café Would Turn Santa into a Duck Dynasty Fan

Dee Felice Café, a Cajun-Creole joint in Covington, KY, stands in a historic building near the site of the 1856 slave escape that inspired Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved.

About 130 years later, the late jazz drummer and band leader Dee Felice started his restaurant in this building at the corner of 6th and Main. Three decades after that, his daughter Shelly now runs the front end and her husband Patrick Nelson runs the kitchen.

Patrick is a writer buddy of mine and I’ve read his stories. After a day herding ourselves through the maze at IKEA (where the Swedes apparently stole the color scheme from the US Navy Blue Angels and then mocked up a floor plan to approximate the layout of the children’s game “Candy Land”), Jill and I went to see if Patrick is as skillful in the kitchen as he is on the page.

Shelly greeted us at the hostess desk like we were old friends. She seated us at a table near the big picture windows that overlook MainStrasse Village.

What if the kid writes back?

Say you’re writing to your 12-year-old self. What do you do if the kid writes back?

I’m not the first guy to wonder, “If I were to meet another version of myself, my kid self, what would I say to him?” Richard Bach explored the idea in his novel, One. A couple a' Joes battled it out in the movie, "Looper."  Amy Pond in "Dr. Who."

I’d dreamed up my own version. In a bubble of overlapping timelines, I met my boy self on a winding road in rural Marion County, the summer before his 8th grade.