Things I learned on my summer vacation

How is it that Elaine is able to accomplish all she does? “No traffic!”

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Ohio’s Old Soul’s Farms has a beautiful logo.

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“Uneventful till Thursday” may describe weather.

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Brenda Gibson, a civilian Army employee, died on September 11, 2001. A sheet with her name hung from an overpass on Interstate 70.

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Norman Corwin’s We Hold These Truths is a 1941 radio drama about the Bill of Rights. Stirring and timely.

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Julie’s Diner, same as it ever was: excellent.

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“Your Forecast First” is hardly the signature gimmick our local television-news organization would have us believe it is. It’s what one hears on stations owned by Nexstar Broadcast Group.

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Brookline, Massachusetts, now has a little shop, Top Drawer, selling stationery, books, bags, and other nifty items. It’s something like CW Pencil Enterprise, minus CW and the preciousness. Top Drawer’s clip-on sunglasses fit my glasses perfectly. But $90? I couldn’t. I bought pencils and a notebook instead.

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Sichuan Gourmet is an excellent restaurant, housed in the building that housed Chef Chang when Boston housed Elaine and me. Fresh bamboo shoots in wonder sauce: a wonder. Cheung Du Street BBQ: a fish dish that’s both downhome and otherworldly.

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Ben is a great host.

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Trouble — the game, that is — is the perfect addition to an already lively evening. The sing-songy cry of “Truhh-bull!” when a player zaps an opponent’s game-piece never grows old.

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Kupel’s, the bagel place? It’s pronounced “couples.” There’s even a sign inside with the correct pronunciation.

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Allston and Brookline are teeming with bakeries. Business must be rising.

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At Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, an exhibition of weapons from around the world made me despair about human priorities. So much artistry in the service of killing.

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The Guna, or Kuna, or Cuna, are an indigenous people of Panama and Colombia. Their stick dolls, suar nuchukana, wooden effigies, represent spirits invoked in healing. Neckties and walking sticks sometimes identify the human agents who speak to the spirits. In stick doll language, hat means “brain power.”

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Across from Sanders Theatre, excellent food trucks. Captain Marden’s Seafoods sends out the Cod Squad, which makes a superior crab cake sandwich.

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Maurice Wertheim, a Harvard alum whose art collection fills a gallery of the Harvard Art Museums, was one astute collector.

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With admission tags for two museums on my shirt pocket, I turned into General Admission.

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Lyonel Feininger, American artist, haunts me. I see a painting of his in a museum, write down his name, plan to look him up, don’t look him up, then see another painting, upon which the process repeats.

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The Harvard Art Museums create small exhibitions to accompany select courses. Having heard, on the way to Boston, a podcast with Stephen Greenblatt talking about Adam and Eve, we lucked into an exhibition tied to a Greenblatt course about A and E and ethical reasoning: Dürer, Blake, Rembrandt, even Diane Arbus’s photograph of senior-citizen nudists in their living room. Disappointing: the podcast we heard hit the points that are likely to arise in just about any competent college-classroom discussion of the story. It was like listening to one of my own classes. Nothing new here, folks. Move along.

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John McPhee’s Draft No. 4, new and used, is everywhere. (Stefan, I bought a copy.)

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Besitos is a slightly upscale Mexican restaurant just outside Boston. Thank you, Burton.

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Besitos features a tableside guacamole preparation. Our waiter cut avocados in two with a dinner knife and popped out the pits as if it were easy — which, for him, it must be.

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Calabacitas: yellow squash, zucchini, and other vegetables.

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Dinner at Besitos includes a worry doll for each diner. Especially helpful in 2018.

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The difference between an Amazon Books store and an authentic bookstore: a real bookstore has many, many, many more books. I’ve been in airport bookstores that are better than the Amazon store we walked through, which resembled a showroom for a limited array of consumer goods. It made me think of the stores where people used to redeem supermarket trading stamps.

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Alex Johnson’s book Book Towns: Forty-Five Paradises of the Printed Word — about towns known for bookstores — was for sale in the Amazon Books store. The Amazon Books store must be an irony-free zone.

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Andipop: Andean pop music.

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Mirella Cesa es La Dueña del Andipop.

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Stevdan Stationers has moved from 474 to 473 Sixth Avenue.

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Three Lives continues to be our favorite bookstore in New York. I didn’t mind paying list price for Ward Farnsworth’s The Practicing Stoic in a store with a small stack of copies.

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“If I didn’t drink profusely, I’d be ripped out. All my boys’d be ripped”: one New York City cop to another.

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Staying with my mom was a great adventure in family time. Hospitality galore. Thank you, Mom. And several chances for my mom to see great-granddaughter Talia on FaceTime.

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Tibetan spaniels are beyond cute.

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Canned rosé from Trader Joe’s: surprisingly not bad.

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Penfolds Koonunga Hill Shiraz is real wine: big, dry, spicy. Thank you, Jim and Luanne.

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There is no ñ in habanero, which is named for Havana.

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Manhattan makes me think of a medieval city — streets filled with beggars, vendors, and clowns — that is, costumed characters. “My lemonade is the best in the city!” The cries of New York.

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The Waverly Diner is as great as its neon sign. One step inside — and someone asks how many we are (two). We’re seated immediately. No rush to turn our table. But when I walk up to the cashier to pay, she takes the check from me before the previous customer has begun to sign his receipt. These people mean business.

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A Cheeseburger Deluxe remains what it has always been: cheeseburger, fries, coleslaw, pickle, lettuce and tomato. A sacred assembly. But also: two onion rings.

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We heard the music from a distance — a marching band? No. As we moved closer, we heard what sounded like a cross between a New Orleans brass band and Indian pop music. A circle of men dancing. A circle of women dancing. Bystanders smiling and clapping and taking pictures. A groom on a white horse, dancing while seated, moving slowly toward a hotel entrance. The bride must have already been in the hotel. A cop told us that streets shut down for short periods all over Manhattan for Indian wedding festivities.


[Notice the dancer on the other side of the horse.]

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Back in New Jersey, everyone seemed to already know about Indian weddings.

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The Morgan Library exhibition The Magic of Handwriting: The Pedro Corrêa do Lago Collection, now gone, was full of wonders. Bach, Borges, Joyce, Proust. The seven-year-old Victoria (as in Queen) had extraordinary handwriting. So many people didn’t: Napoleon, Rasputin, illegible.

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Borges’s printing, as seen on this manuscript page, looks so much like my notes from college, except that Borges had wider spacing, much longer ascenders, and wrote his ts as capitals. And he was Borges.

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Cephalophore: a head-carrying saint. St. Firmin, a missionary from Spain, was one. Someone at the Morgan had a good time writing the placard that went with his statue:

St. Firmin persevered in his pious duties despite the inconvenience of decapitation. According to John Chrysostom, an influential late-antique theologian, this particularly dramatic type of miracle was thought to terrify the devil. Artistic renderings of the macabre sanctity of cephalophoric saints, exemplified by this sublimely self-possessed Gothic statue of St. Firmin, were likely intended to scare the hell out of medieval viewers as well.

[St. Firmin Holding His Head. Limestone and paint. Amiens, France, ca. 1225–75.]

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E. 41st Street between Fifth and Park is Library Way, with passages from several dozen writers on plaques embedded in the sidewalk. I especially liked seeing Willa Cather, rendered like so:

. . .there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before. . .
. . .there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before. . .
. . .there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before. . .

and so on.

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Driving back: midwestern emptiness can be beautiful. I don’t know how to explain the little blue patch.



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2277.3 miles : 54.1 MPG : 57 MPH

More things I learned on my summer vacation
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