Art is 80

When I went to upload this post, it told me that some of the photos did not upload. When I publish this, I will see what failed and I will work around the problem.

Today, our goal was to drive an hour to Selma, look at the bridge and go to the National Voting Rights Museum, maybe have lunch and come back to Montgomery or maybe come back to Montgomery for lunch. Selma was so fascinating, though, that we didn’t get back to Montgomery until about 3:30, and we never got to the Voting Rights Museum.

Let me explain. Once you get outside of Montgomery, the road to Selma (about 50 miles away) is very pleasant. It’s a divided road that goes through very attractive farm country. You go through no towns. As you approach Selma, you see some typical roadside commercial structures and you pass the Voting Rights Museum, which we decided to visit on the way out of town.

Then, before you know it, you are crossing the Edmond Pettus Bridge that you have seen so many times before when you watch led the violence that occurred at the start of the Voting Rights March to Montgomery. You drive across the bridge and there you are in downtown Selma on Broad Street.

Some things to know about Selma: first, it was settled in the 1820s as a trading post on the Alabama River. Then, during the Civil War, there were armament factories. And then things looked better through Reconstruction but stagnated after. Finally, the population is almost 50% less today than in 1960 (today about 17,000) and today the population is 80% Black

When a city has lost half its population, you can’t expect its downtown to look like it once did. But what you see in Selma is shocking.

Nobody’s home.

We met a very nice woman who lived there all her life and heard how vibrant Broad Street was back in the day, as she pointed to vacant storefronts and told us what used to be there. She also told us about the active Jewish community with members who owned buildings and operated stores downtown, and told us to sure to drive by the now closed but still preserved synagogue, Congregation Mishkan Israel.

There seemed to be no place to eat in Selma, except for a new and very odd Filipino restaurant, called Bistro Manila’s, which we thought really needed our support. On Saturday, they don’t use their menu but have a buffet of Manila street food. The restaurant, which has been open about 60 days, seems to be owned by a local man and his wife from the Philippines. I wouldn’t go out of my way to eat there again, but it was interesting and did the trick. My drink was a Philippines canned mango juice, which had a kosher hecksher that I had never seen before

The local owner told us we should visit the Live Oak Cemetery, which we did, and found the graves of former Vice President Wm. Rufus King, and Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, whose reputation is not the greatest (although the Daughters of the Confederacy praise him to the skies; they maintain his grave). There are many Confederate flags at the old and very large cemetery, and it is beautiful

Between Broad Street and the cemetery there is an extensive historic residential area, with many large and medium sized historic homes. All of a sudden, we felt we were in a real place, not a ghost town. In fact, we drove around quite a lot and much of Selma a normal tourist wouldn’t see.

We found the arts district and a first class coffee/lunch spot. We left Selma, back over the bridge and drove past the Voting Rights Museum because we wanted to get to the Fine Arts Museum before it closed at 5. Which we did.

The art museum is not large, but it’s set in a beautiful park and is airy and comfortable. We looked at two special exhibits and the permanent collection. I am going to put some of the paintings that appealed to me most in a separate post after we get home.

Ready to start the drive back. Two of three days on the road. Stay tuned.

First, a digression. Remember a day or so ago when I said I knew nothing about Pulaski TN. I forgot to mention one thing. Pulaski is the home of the Ku Klux Klan. The place where the Klan began. It’s also the hometown of post John Crowe Ransom who did not write any poem where Klan was used to rhyme with began.

Ok, today.

My quick impression of Montgomery. It’s the Capitol of Alabama (and has all the requisite government buildings attractively laid out). But that’s about it for the downtown portion of the city. When you see photos of 1955 Montgomery during the bus boycott, you see a vibrant commercial area. That area just doesn’t exist anymore. There is a placque on the spot where Rosa Parks boarded the bus. But it’s at a spot where there is no trace of 1955.

The Dexter Road Baptist Church is still there with appropriate homage to Martin Luther King, Jr., but where are the houses in what must have been a vibrant surrounding neighborhood? They must have existed.

Where are the historic black areas? Where do the prominent residents of the city live? No idea. Where to find a place to park your car downtown? That’s the easy one. Parking lots galore.

We came here to see the new Legacy Museum and it  is terrific and everyone should go and see it. It is very large and tells of the African American experience very broadly. But it is not a museum of artifacts. It’s a museum of history told with words and videos and photos.

I read that the average visitor spends three to five hours there. That seemed impossible. But we arrived a little after 9 a.m., and left about one p.m. That’s four hours. And we could have seen more.

It starts with transport from Africa, tells of slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, segregation, the civil rights movement. And it’s mainly in printed words on walls. If you come, be prepared to do a lot of reading. Yes, there are many videos (vintage films and animations), and some really well done, but the story is in the descriptions and the articles, and the quotations.

On the other hand, there are fascinating statistics and story lines you may have forgotten or never learned. And this is important. And the stories are told in a very engaging manner.

Do I have any criticisms? Sure, as always. In a sense, it’s too much. And it doesn’t seem to have been created with children (of any age) in mind. We saw some school groups – the kids don’t have the necessary patience. And it tells one side (yes, the better side) of a complicated story at times, so while everything is factual, you don’t always see all of the facts. And it’s about Blacks as victims and Blacks who fought against victimhood – it doesn’t have any focus on Whites that helped Blacks move forward, for example..

This museum will broaden your appreciation of the Black experience. And, living today in America, broadening your experience is crucial.

Another digression. Two weeks ago we saw The Lehman Trilogy at the Shakespeare Theatre. The Lehman Bros. got their start as cotton brokers in Montgomery. The Legacy Museum is on the site of a Lehman Bros. wearhouse.

The museum was opened in 2018 by the Equal Justice Initiative. Just two weeks ago, EJI opened the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park on the banks of the Alabama River, a 17 acre site where a large number of large sculptures of very good quality tells the same story in a different way. We had no idea the Park just opened (the official grand opening is not until June 19, 2024), and that park is now undergoing a soft opening only. It is an important supplement to the museum.

Unfortunately, neither museum allows photographs.

We also went to the Rosa Parks Museum, a small museum operated by Troy University. It’s a Montgomery story, so it was worth seeing although there was some redundancy with what is told about Parks at the Legacy Museum. And you can take pictures.

And finally, as Montgomery was the first capital of the Confederacy, we went to see the first “White House” where Jefferson Davis lived before the capital was moved to Richmond. I was surprised to see it right next to the Capitol. Then we read this was not the original site, but that the house was moved to this site a mere 103 years ago.

Food today? Not important. An odd lunch at the museum, and a Mexican dinner at Ixtapa.

Digression 3. Did you know that not that long ago the Mexican government financed two new resorts to build up tourism? One they call Ixtapa. The other they called Cancun.

Today we are off to Selma.

Our day started off nicely. We stayed in Franklin TN, just south of Nashville. Getting there had been painful because of rush hour traffic, and our hotel was next to a large shopping mall, not in the old center of Franklin. I had been there years ago with a client and knew it was much more interesting than the Galleria, so I thought we should explore a bit before moving on. The “explore a bit” turned into almost three hours.

We looked at the historic markers and buildings near the central square/circle, and did a fair amount of gift shopping before driving through some of the battlefield and looking at some historical homes. We saw that 10,000 soldiers, Union and Confederate, died or were wounded within 5 hours at one sight, Carnton Hall, which was turned into a Confederate hospital and where a cemetery was built for those who didn’t make it. We saw the oldest Masonic Hall still in use, where the treaty with the Chickasaw Indians was signed, we drove on some of the Trail of Tears,we read of some of the experiences of Franklin’s African Americans before and after the war.

And finally we left. And when we did the rains started and they kept up until about 30 miles from our destination. And the rains were heavy and sometimes blinding, and we got off the Interstate where the speeds were much too fast for the visibility. And the traffic as we went through Birmingham was ridiculous. Which means that a three and a half hour drive took closer to five.

Because it was raining, we really didn’t do any exploring. We stopped for lunch in Pulaski, Tennessee at Kitchen 218, a sports bar type place right on the main business street. This was a good choice. Actually, not a choice. It was the only restaurant we saw. But if you are hungry in Pulaski, it’s the spot. And, for the second time in two days, the waitress gave me a cup of coffee, not charging me.

I don’t know much (i.e., anything) about Pulaski. But before we entered the town, we passed a large, ornate wrought iron gate with the words “Welcome to the Milky Way Ranch” written above it. What could that be? You know?

It turns out that the Milky Way Ranch, all 1100 acres, 20 bedroom house, and 80 other buildings of it, had been the property of the Mars family. (My stars, how does Mars, make such wonderful candy bars?”) And the ranch was named after Mars’ Milky Way candy bars. Now, it’s a fancy event venue.

At about 6:30, we checked into our third Hampton Inn and, on the clerk’s recommendation, had an excellent dinner at Charles Anthony’s restaurant. Salad, salmon, snapper, potatoes, asparagus, grits and okra. Whew.

More tomorrow.

We left St. Louis at 9 this morning. We wound up in Franklin TN a little after 5. In between:

1. After two days of driving through rain, we had four dry days in St. Louis. The minute we got on the road this morning, the rains started again and stayed with us most of the day.

2. I had decided on our route and, I thought, set the GPS. But the GPS had its own ideas and by the time I realized we were driving the route I had decided against, it was too late to get back on our route. So the day went different than planned.

3. In fact, the GPS never conceded that I was the boss. Driving east on Interstate 64, when Edie was napping, it led me off the Interstate onto a country road in Southern Illinois. I followed the changing directions and found myself stymied, realizing that nothing I was doing made sense. I was in a town that was too small to be called a town. Belle Rive, IL. Belle Rive, according to the most recent census, has approximately 300 residents, of whom two are African American. I needed to put gas in the car and GPS told us that there was a gas station in Belle Rive. Not. There was one in the next town on Illinois Route 147, Dahlgren. The key word is “was”. The pumps no longer work.

4. We wound up in McLeansboro, a town of a few thousand. No problem. I got the gas at a Roc One station. It has a mini-store and went in to get a cup of coffee. I asked the cashier how much I owed her. “Just take it”, she said. Wow. The Roc One may be the best thing in town, other than the architecture of a small bank.

Almost all the other downtown buildings were empty, something we saw over and over today.

5. We then went through El Dorado, which I think is pronounced el-do-ray-do. Named after two original settlers, Elder and Reed.., with the name being distorted over the years. Lunch in Eldorado at a Mexican restaurant, where Edie won the lottery with a mushroom quesadilla. Here are pictures from El Dorado.

6. From El Dorado to Equality. A very small southern Illinois settlement with an absolutely fascinating history. Google it and learn about Native American salt works, taken by the US by “treaty”, worked by slaves in free state Illinois(!!). Then learn about John Crenshaw, who ran part of the salt works, but made his money capturing run away slaves and bringing them back south.

7. From there to Shawneetown, another empty down and Old Shawneetown, on the Ohio River. There is virtually nothing in Old Shawneetown except for two old bank buildings. Here is one of them.

8. Crossing into Kentucky, where the flat land turned into beautiful rolling country. Learned the grass is green not blue and that cows greatly outnumber thoroughbreds.

9. We drove into Sturgis (and yes they have a bike festival), where again everything seemed vacant, but they have a very fine 100 booth antique mall, where we bought some gifts for the grandchildren.

10. By now, we were tired and anxious to get settled. We went through more places without stopping and wound up back on an Interstate and drove by Nashville to Franklin where we now are. Again a Hampton Inn, and a sub-sub-sub-sub standard meal at Jonathan’s Grille next door where everything was fine but the food.

Yes, this was too long. But so interesting.

And busy it was.

Our first stop in the morning was picking up my second cousin, once removed, whom we had met for the first time a few months ago in Virginia Beach. She is an artist and lives in an apartment building for artists in downtown St. Louis. The building, a classic building formerly an office and retail building provides affordable apartments for artists along with studio space and other amenities. Washington DC is talking about converting over capacity office space to residential and is finding it so challenging. St. Louis has found the trick, it appears, and has done it time and again.

We drove a mile or a little more to the Lafayette Square neighborhood and a little coffee house on Park Street called the Park Avenue Cafe and had breakfast and talked. Then we drove all around the Lafayette Square neighborhood and looked at the gentrified old housing stock. it’s quite a classy area now. When I lived here it was hopelessly falling to pieces. Now virtually all homes have been renovated at least once. Most of the houses date from the second half of the nineteenth century. The park itself, the oldest public park west of the Mississippi, was laid out in the 1830s. The neighborhood also has many shops and restaurants.

From there, a little wandering around downtown and close by areas and then lunch at a combined nursery and restaurant, Bowood, located midtown on Olive Street. Here we were with a law school friend and his wife (obviously also a friend) and an old college friend whom I had not seen in many years.

Then back to Missouri Baptist Hospital where we spent a few hours with my cousin, who has been moved out of the ICU and looked good.  And then driving down Geyer Road into Kirkwood, where we met another couple with whom we have been friends for almost 50 years at Peppe’s Apt. 2, where we had a nice Italian dinner. Well ..with one exception. I didn’t get what I thought I ordered, but didn’t know that I didn’t get and only thought it was a very subtle version of what I ordered until I discovered that Mark, the waiter, and I the customer heard and said very different things. And who knows? Maybe I ordered by accident what he thought I ordered. After all, nothing is simple these days.

At any rate, one more great conversation.

We are heading southeast this morning, eventually to wind up in  Montgomery, Alabama. We are sorry we couldn’t see everyone in St. Louis this trip, but in three days we saw Donna, Ed, Richard, Jacci, Bob, Simone, Andrea, Judy, Michael, Wendy, Brigid, Pat, Nora, Molly, Suresh (and kids), Stuart, Betsy, Fran, Peggy and Charlie. Not bad.

So, having watched the solar eclipse through my free Warby Parker glasses (a huge shout out to Warby Parker), I am now convinced more than ever that the moon is closer than the sun. Not only that, but I am convinced that the sun is very bright. What I mean by that is that, when the moon has blocked out 90+ % of the sun, it is still very light outside. So my advice to the sun is to relax a bit. Don’t burn yourself out. And my advice to the moon? It was very cool when you blocked out the sun. You didn’t need to rush it. Next time, go slower.

We watched the full eclipse from Makanda, Illinois, just south of Carbondale.

A digression. The son in law of good friends, with whom we spent time on Sunday, calls Carbondale “CarBAHNdali”. Once that gets into your head, you will never be the same.

Carbondale has the honor of being the one place that the lines for the 2017 and 2024 eclipsed crossed and Carbondale, the home of about 30,00 people and Southern Illinois University with its 15,000 students, was buzzing. The special production at the football stadium seems to have thousands of spectators, each of whom from the looks of the parking lot must have driven two cars.

A few miles south in Makanda, at it’s “hippie” boardwalk, there must also have been teems of people. We were advised to stay away if we didn’t want our car to be trapped for hours

A two hour drive took about three. Better than we feared. We took Illinois state roads and avoided Interstates which turned out to be a good move. Except at stop lights, where things got quite backed up, traffic moved smoothly. Coming back, the roads were slower. On the route we tok after the eclipse, the problem was roadwork, not stop signs.  Each way, the 100 mile trip took over an hour longer than usual.

Second digression. We are lucky we didn’t take an Interstate. Friends who took an Interstate toward St. Genevieve never got there, the traffic was so bad.

The day was beautiful. Blue sky. Temperature exceeded 80. We were at the home of Randy, our friend Judy’s son, who is a physician and works at the federal prison at nearby Marion. They have a beautiful place on 67 wooded acres, and the setting was beautiful and the group was small. We all enjoyed the silence, the subtle light changes, the eeriness, the sudden drop in temperature and the four minutes of quasi-darkness. We followed the moon’s progress and marveed at the entire situation.

Third digression. The other four people with us were Brian, Britt, Julia and Mary. I am so bad at names that I have been saying these four names over and over. But I don’t really know who these people are.

I wish I had a camera good enough to distinguish the changes in light, or to catch the moon’s encroachment, but alas, my cell phone camera was not up to the challenge.

One picture from one of those watching with us.

And one more from the Japanese restaurant that ended our day.

Today was primarily a family and friends day. Or…….

Twas the day before eclipse,

And all through St. Lou,

People were asking

“Now what should I do?”

“Stay in Missouri and

Drive to the south?

Answer me, answer me,

Open your mouth.”

An Arkansas traveler, now

that I could be.

Will the sun be eclipsed

In nearby Tennessee?

Or should I stay home

And miss the eclipse?

Answer me, answer me.

Open your lips.”

Our plan is to hit the road early and drive just south of Carbondale, Illinois, about 100 miles. I will report back tomorrow.

We started today visiting old collge friends of mine. As usual, a great conversation. But today, it was special. Their two daughters were in town – one from Seattle and one from New York. And Seattle (who in days gone by spent a summer in our basement) came with her husband and three children. Our friends, who are ridding themselves of their long-standing house and moving into an apartment in a seniors building  in Clayton are in the process of downsizing. And I mean “in the process”. What a task that is.

We then had lunch at a little cafe call Meshughah. If you are on Facebook, you probably also know we have seen Strange Donuts, Cursed Coffee, and The Joint (a chiropractor’s office). Ah, St. Louis

We then paid a visit to my hospitalized cousin, and had dinner (pizza) with two other cousins and spouses.

Hopefully tomorrow, the sun will shine, the traffic won’t be bad, and we will get home in time to have supper with another friend. Did I say “home”?

Until then…..

We started in St. Louis and ended in St. Louis.

First, hooray to Waterway Car Wash. Second, boo to Strange Donuts.

We spent most of the day with our friend Judy at the St. Louis Art Museum, one of the best. The special exhibits included one titled Matisse and the Sea. You can figure out what it’s about.

I like these three pieces, I must admit. But I also must confess that I have never really been a Matisse fan. In fact, I think he’s one of the four most overrated artists of the 20th century. The other three are Ellsworth Kelly, Cy Twombley and Joan Miro. I know no one would probably agree, but that’s my opinion. Period.

One of my favorite 20th century artist is Anselm Kieffer. Here is one in the St. Louis museum.

And I like Max Beckmann.

And then I saw this great urban overview made only from miniature electric circuits by an Ethiopian artist, Elias Sime.

And finally

a detail of a painting by Oskar Kokoshka. O.K.?

We had lunch in the Panorama Room at the museum. A fine lunch it was, but the service took forever. Not sure I’d want to do it again. The waiter assured us it was not his fault, that he was controlled by the chef.

Dinner, which was delicious at our friend Wendy’s, with Judy and Michael. Much reminiscing and much trying to remember things that our younger selves would have figured out much more quickly.

Today promises to be busy, so… let’s get to work.

To end the suspense: we arrived in St. Louis at about 5. The skies were sunny.

We started off at the Hampton Inn in Richmond Indiana. The night was better than I feared. About 10 o’clock from our room, I heard the siren of a railway train which seemed very close, and again at 10:30 and I feared being up all night. My PTSD returned, thinking of our disastrous times at the St. Regis in Houston and at Badlands National Park in South Dakota, where trains keep me up all night, and in Albuferia Portugal where the villain was a church bell. But the later trains turned down the volume and I slept pretty well.

We explored Richmond in the morning. An extraordinarily interesting 19th century business area, where most buildings and storefronts are empty and the chance of restoring the area seems dim.The same is true of the historic residential neighborhood, the Starr neighborhood, Interesting homes, falling apart. (The day before we went through the historic residential area of Springfield Ohio which is in much better shape.)

But outside of the center of town, Richmond seems to be doing all right. What make some of these towns fail and some thrive? Even just west of Richmond, there are small towns which are in great shape – shops, homes, all in pristine condition

We drove through Indiana, stopping for a lunch in a town that hardly exists, Cloverdale Indiana. Lou’s Diner, like the restaurants the last two nights, was filled to capacity. I think we were the only tourists. Where did they all come from?

We had stayed on the freeway through Indianapolis as time seemed to be growing short. We were moving quickly and then a problem arose. There was apparently a crash that closed I-70 and we were stuck for about 30 minutes. By the time we got to the detour exit, though, they had just opened the road and off we went.

We then made 5 stops in Illinois. First to see a 200 foot long covered bridge over the Embarras River. The bridge was just built in 2000. But it was an exact copy of the original bridge built in 1832 and washed away about 30 years later. The original bridge was built by future president Abraham Lincoln and his father Thomas.

Then we stopped Effingham, a midsize small city, which I expected would be in sad condition like the three other cities we had explored. But no, it looked to be thriving. No vacancies, people walking on the streets. It looked like a thriving 1950s city.

And then we went to Greenville. An old friend grew up there and I had never been there. Turned out Greenville was atypical, busy and attractive. The layout was unusual, there is a university, a large number of well kept houses.

And, oh, I should also mention Casey IL, a town that hardly exists but has a DQ where I got a chocolate sundae. And Mulberry Grove, which used to exist but is now has a few empty stores, a closed school and a church.  I closed my eyes for 15 minutes, which was very refreshing.

We got to St. Louis about 5:30, went to our friend Judy’s house, and then to dinner at a restaurant in Clayton, called Oceano. Fish all around. My salmon, Edie’s trout and Judy’s sea bass. All excellent.

Ohio Day is done. Of course, it started in Pennsylvania (where there were snow flurries on April 4) and we had to cross the West Virginia panhandle to get there. Crossing through Wheeling, I caught a glimpse of the worst motel we ever stayed at, a Comfort Inn that overlooks I-70. I remember a room filled with mildew and the desk clerk, before she finally moved us, telling us that it only smelled that way because no one had used it in a long time. She grudgingly moved us to the other side of the motel, which was not much better.

But that was then. Yesterday, we buzzed by and soon found ourselves in Ohio, near St. Clairesville (where I left my credit card two years ago). We whisked by there, too.

That’s when, with some trepidation because the weather was still off and on problematic, we decided to get off I-70 and travel via US 40, the old National Highway. We got off at Old Washington OH (see a pattern?), a very small town. Traveling quickly, I noted that much of the country along the road was quite marshy. Soon I realized that it was not marshland, but oversaturated forest and farm land. And then Highway 40 was closed due to standing water. And no, there was no warning, no marked detour and none possible. We had to backtrack and get back on the Interstate at Old Washington.

By the way, a digression. Going all across Ohio, largely off the Interstate, we only saw 3 Trump signs. Four years ago we would have seen dozens. One of the three was at Old Washington, where a house had a big Trump sign, a Trump flag, an America First banner

Back to the main text: We got back on Highway 40 after a few miles and had no additional problems the rest of the day. Highway 40 is pleasant enough, with a few historical sites and buildings. We only stopped once more that morning at a 50 vendor flea market. They had nothing of any interest to me that I saw, and I can’t imagine much of it ever being sold. Sort of like a large store filled with Goodwill rejects.

We noticed several other antique malls. Any would I am sure have been better. But we were done with that for the day.

We got to Zanesville about 12:30. A town about the size of Washington PA, formerly a pottery center, it was named after Ebeneezer Zane, an ancestor of writer Zane Gray, who was born there. And it’s the home of the Zane Gray Museum. A county seat, it has a wonderfully ornate county courthouse and a few historic homes. It has a sizeable central business district with a lot of vacancies and, we thought no restaurants at all. Then we found the Downtown Exchange, a unique food court with about a dozen small stands – pizza, Greek, Japanese, Mexican, Sandwich, desserts, coffee shop and more, and a good amount of common seating. Not bad and certainly not expected. But Zanesville seemed a bit lost and forgotten, and apparently is very different from what it used to be.

Then, after some discussion, we decided to stay on 40 and drive right through Columbus, knowing that would add an hour to our trip. We don’t know Columbus at all and it was worth doing. East of the city, the suburbs of Bexton and Reynoldsburg hold miles of upscale shopping, downtown Columbus is filled with attractive tall buildings, as well as the Ohio State buildings and so on. Moving west, the neighborhoods are maybe a bit more sketchy, but interesting. It looks like a city worth a few days as a tourist to be sure.

From there it was across the western part of the state, farms, towns, rain, clouds, hills, plains. The only city of note is Springfield , which seems much more vibrant than Zanesville. Then, without fanfare you are in Indiana and almost immediately after that in Richmond, another old, old place.

We will explore Richmond today. But last night we went to another large Italian restaurant, Galo’s. I’d give it an A. We had eggplant Parmesan and breaded cod over pappardelle. Strawberry gelato for dessert. It’s not downtown, but in a large building of it’s own, near a big mall. The dining room is very large and ornate, a unique design where most of the tables are within a round area, but behind the round area, the room is square with other tables and the bar located a step or two up.

Then, back to a different Hampton Inn to prepare for Indiana/ Illinois Day, and falling back an hour.

The first day of the trip belongs to the history books. We left home in heavy rain at just before 11 a.m. and arrived in Washington PA at about 3:30. We stopped for lunch in Hancock MD. We had rain most of the way. Sometimes strong, sometimes drizzle. But never a real problem. Never blinding. No wind to speak of. But because it was gray and wet, we didn’t do our usual exploring but stuck to the Interstates (270, 70, 68, and 79). Traffic was less than anticipated everywhere.

We have stopped in Hancock before. We remember going to the local Hancock historical museum and finding much of interest. We don’t remember if we went to any restaurant and nothing looked familiar.

A few things about Hancock. First, it’s a fairly depressing place on a beautiful day. Even more so today, when much seemed to be closed, including the museum and several restaurants.. Some places open on weekends. Some perhaps open never.

Second, we did find a restaurant , the Triangle. It’s friendly and clean and the food was pretty good. We had a fish basket (fried haddock and steak fries) and a Reuben. Very nice waitress. I’d give it a strong B. Why not higher? The place was totally devoid of personality of atmosphere. Just plain boring.

Third, Hancock is small. Only about 1500 and holding.

Fourth, it was not named after John Hancock.

Finally it’s located at the narrowest part of Maryland. The width of Maryland at Hancock is 2 miles, making it the narrowest such place in any state in the country.

Washington PA is a different case. It’s about 10 times the size of Hancock and was at one time twice that size. That means a lot of downtown Washington is vacant.

But there’s a lot of history there, including much concerned with Whiskey Rebellion. This is the home of the rebellion and its leader, David Bradford. Here are some photos of historic Washington.

The Bradford House.

A sample 18th century log cabin.

The three Whiskey Rebels

We decided to get an early dinner and looking on our phones decided on the Union Grill, a downtown restaurant that, in spite of its name, is Italian. Located in an older building, down a half dozen steps so that you are sort of in the basement ,it is quite large, with a bar and several dining rooms. We went in at 5:45, expecting it to be fairly empty. It was packed, with tables of people eating big Italian meals. Our waitress told us it was this way every day. And when we left about 7, tables were still filled and people still coming in. Outside, the tow looked, both at 5:45 and at 7, deserted. Go figure.

The food was pretty good, angel hair pasta primavera, and swordfish with linguini.

We drove around town, saw the campus of Washington and Jefferson University and went back to our hotel.

That’s it for Day 1. Day 2 will be Ohio Day. Bet you can’t wait. I can’t. Because it’s still raining in PA, but it will clear up in Ohio.

Lucky you. You’ll be able to follow our trip as we leave Washington and go to St. Louis to see friends and family, Carbondale IL for the eclipse, and then Montgomery and Selma AL for a civil rights tour.  Ambitious to be sure, but I think we can do it.

Today, we are going to start off (and maybe end up) in rain and we aren’t going to rush it. Slow and steady, we don’t really care how far we get.

Looking forward to a couple of days in the car, hopefully relaxed and care free.

I wasn’t planning on writing about Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., but I just saw his interview on the Erin Burnett show on CNN, and attention must be paid.

The most striking thing that I heard on the interview is that Joe Biden is a bigger threat to American democracy than Donald Trump. Apparently, this is because Kennedy thinks that Biden has politicized the Department of Justice, and that no other president has ever done this before. Since that is false as to both claims, there are only two possibilities: one is that Kennedy is out of his mind (this is a good bet) and the other is that he is trying as hard as he can, any way he can, to take votes from Joe Biden. That is what makes him so terrifying. He doesn’t have to take away a lot of votes, particularly in those bell weather states.

I will give Kennedy credit for being able to list all of the problems we have in this country, domestic and foreign. He went through a laundry list of them. And he then declared that neither Biden nor Trump have a ghost of a chance of resolving any of them. He claims that the Democratic Party has given up on the working class, and that Trump is just fooling the working class to make them believe that he is working for them. But Kennedy himself, he says, is really for the working class.

You would think that he would then have given at least some hint of how he would help the working class, that he would describe some of his policies and how they would differ from the two major candidates, of how he would work with a Congress with no members who belong to the same party as President Kennedy, Jr would belong to and who would be positioning themselves immediately for the next presidential elections. But no, he didn’t go there. Didn’t go near there. He did say that there was basically no difference between the Biden and Trump policies (except on the very margins).

Of course, he also didn’t talk about the various conspiracies he subscribes to. He is very anti-vaccine (but you know that), but he says that, well, not anti-vaccine, he just thinks they need to be tested more, because as they exist today, they cause autism and peanut allergies. But apparently he is also against fluoridation of water, against acetaminophen, He accused Anthony Fauci and Bill and Melinda Gates of profiting off of COVID-19, and of forcing people to get vaccinations or have their Gates subsidies all cut off. He accused them of trying to prolong the pandemic to increase vaccine sales. He posted a picture of Fauci with a Hitler mustache. He said that COVID was engineered to attack certain groups of people, like Caucasians and Blacks, but that Chinese and Ashkenazic Jew were mostly immune. He claims that no one really knows if HIV and AIDS are related. He has also expressed doubts about Lee Harvey Oswald killing his uncle Jack (and apparently believes that the CIA might have been involved), and believes that Sirhan Sirhan did not kill his father. He believes the 2004 election was rigged and stolen and that Jack Kerry was the legitimately elected president. He does not seem concerned about guns (he says we have the same number of guns per capita as Switzerland, which is not true, I am told).

He does have a strong environmental background, both as a litigator and as a non-profit leader. You can’t deny him that (I don’t think).

His sisters Rory, Kathleen and Kerry and his brother, Joe have all come out against his candidacy, as have Joe’s son Joe III, and cousins from the Shriver and Schlossberg families.

Unfortunately, the Kennedy name still means something to some people. This is why, according to one critic, he is a candidate for the presidency and not just another crackpot.

It is unclear today how many states will put them on their ballot. That question, if you are really observant, takes us back to another of my posts from a few months ago. If Colorado cannot tell Trump he can’t go on the ballot, how can any state tell that to Kennedy? Or, if I wanted to run, to me?

Today is the home opener for that Nationals and we have tickets. The problems are (1) while this morning’s rain will probably stop by game time, the temperature is not to rise above about 55 degrees, (2) I woke up yesterday feeling like I was coming down with something and still today I am not 100% cured, and (3) we are scheduled to leave town Wednesday morning on a road trip, and I want to be fully recovered by then. Plus, yesterday the Nationals blew a 5-3 lead in the bottom of the 9th with two outs, and their closer allowed a double and two home runs to lose to the Reds 6-5. As a loyal fair weather friend, that takes away some of my enthusiasm. So……what should we do?

As to April Fools (and I have no idea who invented that day), my mind always goes back to that April 1 long ago, when I was taking a business trip. Why and where I don’t remember. But I do remember it was Southwest Airlines, from BWI. There was a typical boarding line, and as we got on the plane, we slowly moved towards the back. A man two or three people in front of me stopped to open a top rack and stow his carry-on. He opened the rack door, and there was a Southwest stewardess hiding in the luggage rack who put on a big smile and yelled “April Fools!!”. (Yes, she was very short, and very animated) The problem was that the poor man looked like he was having a heart attack, and the stewardess knew she had made one big mistake. I wonder if, every April 1, she thinks about this, too. She is probably now about 60. When she thinks about it still, I bet she is both embarrassed and in disbelief. Do you think she ever told her kids?

I started this day pretty early, because I wanted to get to Warby Parker (that’s an eyeglass store) when it opened at 10, because I had read that they were giving away glasses for the upcoming solar eclipse, which we plan on attending in southern Illinois. I went to their Union Market store, entered at 10:06 and seemed to be their fourth customer. One other was looking for eclipse glasses. They seemed to have about 100 pairs.

So, I think I should give Warby Parker a shout out. I don’t do that often enough, but I really should have a shout out list. Let me add, as number 2, Mamman Cafe, up the street from the Warby Parker store, which is a very comfortable coffee shop/lunch place and has first class coffee and good pastries. It was carry out this morning – an almond croissant and a “small” coffee (their “small” is 12 ounces; they also have an 8 ounce size, which they call “kids” – go figure).

Shout out #3: Echo Falls smoked salmon. I don’t usually pay any attention to what brand of lox I buy at a supermarket. But yesterday, I had lox, cream cheese and a bagel which I thought was much better than usual. The brand was Echo Falls, so I will give them a shout out. I looked them up on line to see what others thought. The first URL that came up showed Echo Falls with a 5.0 rating. Can’t beat that, I thought. I wonder how many people had sent in reviews. The answer? One. I’d make it two.

Other shout outs? Everyday Sundae on Kennedy Street. Fresh Baguette on Wisconsin Avenue. Izumi Japanese Restaurant on Columbia Road. Cafe of India on Wisconsin Ave. I’m Eddie Cano on Connecticut Ave. Gourmet Asian Bistro on Muncaster Mill Road. Those are my March shout outs.

It was the last performance of “The Lehman Trilogy” at the Shakespeare Theatre. We took the Metro, which lets you off on the block of Shakespeare’s Harmon Theatre; nothing could be more convenient. And the round trip only costs us $2 each. But, no matter how convenient, when a 3 and 1/2 hour show starts at 8, and you have to leave the theater, walk about 2/3 of a block to the Metro, etc., you don’t get home until about 12:30 a.m. For us, that’s beyond late these days.

The show is fascinating. Although I haven’t done any fact checking, I would venture to say that this show is a history lesson, a lesson not only in the establishment, growth and demise of the Lehman Brothers’ various business enterprises, but a lesson in long term business economics. On the one hand, it’s simple – buy merchandise and sell it at a profit. Figure out who needs something, and who has something, and become a necessary middleman.

So far, so good. But then there are disruptions. There was, for example a Civil War that destroyed the cotton market, and the Lehman Brothers’ business was at that time all cotton. Later there was World War I, and after that, there was the Great Depression. Throughout all of these cataclysms, the Lehman enterprise held on, when so many others didn’t. But, then, when there were no more Lehmans, and when greed took over and Americans believed that markets would go up and up and up……that’s when the company finally failed. It’s a history lesson – and maybe an economics lesson at the same time.

Of course, beyond the history lesson is the play itself. The Lehman Trilogy has only three actors, each playing multiple roles, each on stage virtually (maybe even actually) the entire 3 and 1/2 hours of the play. Each with thousands of words to say, in different personae, with different accents, even different genders. It was a bravura performance by Edward Gero, Mark Nelson and Rene Thornton, Jr. Thornton is African American. I wondered how he would be playing a 19th century German Jewish refugee, and playing all of these other White parts, especially in the parts of the play set in pre-Civil War Alabama. It worked fine. (I saw from the program that one of the two understudies was a woman, Julie Ann Elliott. I don’t know if she ever had a chance to perform; that would have been interesting – I bet that would have worked, too. And kudos to the unseen Elliott – she had to remember 2/3 of the lines of the play – to be able to go on at a moment’s notice to play either of two of the roles. Wow.)

The structure of the play, with very simple staging, is unique. The multiple roles played by each of the actors transition smoothly. It’s quite worth seeing if you have a chance.

By the way, as to fact checking – which I usually do – in this instance, I didn’t. Because, even though I found this play to be a history lesson, I didn’t think the facts were that important. Uh-oh! Am I on the proverbial slippery slope?

Once we got home and I went to sleep, I had one of my repetitive type dreams. My law firm was falling apart. I had been working hard, but for the past few years, I hadn’t been paid. I always figured that one day, all this would be reconciled, and I would get the hundreds of thousands of dollars I was owed. But I kept putting the day of reckoning off. Now it was almost too late. But who do I talk to? Who do I tell that I haven’t been paid for years? I had worked so hard. But then I remembered. I had never billed any of my clients. And for those clients whose billing responsibility was one of the other lawyers – even when I worked for those clients, I never submitted any time sheets. This clearly would complicate my conversation. What to do?

I had a second dream I remember as well. 8 year old Hannah (not 8 year old Joan, 8 year old Hannah) had received the opportunity to spend a week with a family in Cardiff, Wales, on a program sponsored by the Wall Street Journal, and she really wanted to go. She had to leave in two days, so getting ready was frantic. Then someone asked me about the family she would be staying with and other similar questions. My response was “I have no idea. I am just relying on the Wall Street Journal.” That, I realized this was stupid. But it was too late.

This is officially my 500th consecutive daily post on the blog. I expect that your reaction is: Get a life. Might be a good idea.

Well, on this Saturday, March 30, we are going to see The Lehman Trilogy at the Shakespeare Theater downtown. Hopefully, I will like it, and tell you what I think about it tomorrow.

But today, I want to talk about DC sports. Not that I am an expert (that should relieve you, I guess), but there is a lot to say.

First, the Nationals (that’s our baseball team): The Nationals, in the middle of or near the end of their rebuilding) came off a very strong Spring Training. Here’s what I noticed: First, our set team, which includes many from last year, but two or three new to us but seasoned players who have had fair-to-middling careers so far, played well, but were certainly not exciting. Second, our “prospects”, young guys who were not expected to be on our opening day roster, played much better than our regular team did, but that didn’t seem to mean that much for this year. Third, our starting pitchers were the same five guys who were not as good as they needed to be last year (our relievers include a few new to us pitchers who could be very good).

Conclusion: without pitching, and without bringing up our prospects, it looks like more of the same for the Nats this year. And that’s too bad. [I should add that one of our new fair-to-middling players, Nick Stenzel, unfortunately broke his finger before Opening Day and the Nats called up Trey Lipscomb, one of our prospects to be the starting third basement.]

We have tickets for the home Opening Game Monday at 4. The weather promises to be wet. Of course.

More important is the news about the Wizards (basketball) and the Caps (hockey). Their owner, Ted Leonsis, announced several months ago that he his teams would be leaving downtown DC in four or five years, to move to a new arena and attached entertainment center, to be built in Alexandria, Virginia. As DC’s downtown has been struggling since the pandemic (there are still fewer that half the daily workers downtown, with so many working remotely), with empty sidewalks, vacant storefronts, and closed restaurants, the loss of these two teams seemed like just one more tough blow. And it was presented as a done deal.

But the done deal became undone when, on top of worries and complaints from Alexandria residents who feared the crowds and traffic, the Democrats in the Virginia legislature made it clear that they were not going to support a $1,500,000,000 giveaway to the billionaire team owner and the deal suddenly died. Virginia has a Republican governor, who apparently thought this would be a slam/dunk, and a legislature where both houses are controlled by the Democrats.

Suddenly, everything was reversed. DC Mayor Bowser, DC Council Chair Phil Mendelson, and owner Ted Leonsis turned out to be best friends, and to have been sharing drinks throughout this entire time, and a deal was put forward for the complete modernization of the DC arena. Not only that, but the commercial mall which adjoins the arena (and which had contained an AMC Multiplex and a bowling alley among other things, but which is now fairly empty) is being leased by Leonsis for what I understand will be a 200,000 square foot entertainment center and more, and the DC government is providing all sorts of incentives to protect and clean up the Gallery Place area. This is enormously important for the downtown. I am sure it would have eventually recovered from everything having to do with the last four years (how could it not?), but this will make things much easier and faster, and will certainly help the city’s tax base.

In the meantime, the Wizards (whose record so far this year 14-60) will keep struggling for a long time, but the Caps might even make the playoffs this year; they continue to be exciting to watch and hopefully will keep up the pace they have been on recently as the season winds down.

And then there’s the Commanders (nee Redskins – football) which, under new ownership, is making change after change every day, it seems, and which even talks about building a new stadium at the site of the abandoned RFK Stadium in the District as a replacement for their current home in Prince George’s County MD. We will see if that happens – there will be a lot of neighborhood opposition I am sure, as rebuilt Capitol Hill now extends almost to the RFK grounds. Either way, with new ownership, the Commanders should engender new interest.

That’s it for my sports report. I pay little or no attention to our women’s basketball team, the Mystics, or to our soccer team, DC United. And I note that our neighboring Baltimore Orioles (baseball, of course) also has new ownership, led by Washington good-guy philanthropist David Rubenstein, replacing ownership under Peter Angelos. who recently passed away. This will hopefully make the Orioles and the Nationals friends, and not only rivals for attention.

Last night we watched “Poor Things”. On TV. In the comfort of our own home. The lead actress, Emma Stone, won an Academy Award as Best Actress this year for her role as Bella Baxter. The film has received positive reviews to be sure, has made its investors a lot of money, and has been panned by many of the people I know. It is billed as a comedy. If it’s a comedy, it’s about as noir as a comedy can get.

It’s based on a book, published about 30 years ago, by Alasdair Gray. My guess is that the film and the book are closely related, but quite different at the same time. The book won some awards when it was published as well. I am wondering if I am curious enough to read it.

It also has a lot of sex involving Emma Stone with three men with whom she is weirdly involved, and a bunch of others who are paying her for the privilege (and a brief Lesbian interlude). For this reason, I would support anyone who claims that this movie should not be shown at elementary school assemblies.

It also involves a fair amount of Gore (and not the Al kind), as bodies are cut up or cut into or pulled apart throughout the film.

You see, there was this woman Victoria, who not only had a terrible marriage (since she was married to a mad man, we later see), but found herself pregnant and, at some point near the end of her pregnancy jumped off a bridge into the River Clyde, as it flowed through Glasgow. She wasn’t saved, but her body was pulled out of the water fairly quickly and (for reasons I have already forgot), given to Dr. Godwin Baxter, a mad scientist (and son of a possibly even madder scientist), who took the brain out of the never-to-be-born baby and placed it inside the skull of the baby’s mother, Victoria. This turned out to be super-easy to do. Even a child could do it. No muss. No fuss. Not even any blood.

He names his creation Bella, and she is a fully grown woman with the brain of a just born baby. So she has to learn everything a baby learns, but as an adult. And since she is not a baby, she also has sexual urges that she cannot at all understand, but instinctively knows how to act upon.

God (that’s Godwin’s nickname) hires a young man to help him raise Bella and expects him to marry her, which for some reason the man agrees to do, and they are arranging the wedding when a suave young man appears, sweeps Bella off her feet and takes her to Lisbon and then to Paris; he too is in love with her for whatever reason. And he wants to marry her and she agrees, but she steals all of his money and gives it to two sailors on the ship they are taken to give to the poor of Alexandria (Egypt, not Virginia). This sours their relationship, and they get off the ship in Paris, where she meets a brothel owner who helps her get off her feet and make some money.

Eventually she returns to Scotland where she is to marry the man she left when she went to Lisbon, but this time the ceremony is interrupted by her husband when she was Victoria. In fact, he thinks she still is Victoria.

Bella decides to walk out on her husband to be for a second time, moves in with her Victoria husband, and finds that this doesn’t work any better now than it did then. So she leaves and comes back to the man she was supposed to marry.

She then learns her story, that she is both mother and daughter, which she finds surprising, but something she can live with, and the pledges her love again to her would-be husband. Presumably, they live happily ever after.

This is a really dumb plot. The only reason to see the film is if you want to see Emma Stone having sex again and again. And – that is not a very good reason.

It was quite a shock to hear yesterday that former Senator Joe Lieberman had died. Whether he had been ill at all, I don’t know, but apparently he fell in New York City, and died of complications of the fall at his home in Connecticut. That’s all that has been reported so far.

It certainly gets you thinking about falling. The statistics on how many older people fall are also shocking. The CDC says that about 15 million adults 65 or older report having fallen each year, with 9 million of those requiring medical help or leading to temporary immobility. Falling is the leading cause of injury related deaths among the elderly.

I had lunch with a friend just a few years older than I am last week, and he told me that he had recently fallen and broken his nose. I had coffee with another friend the week before, who is in her early 70s, and she told me that she has fallen four or five times. Another friend, also in her early 70s, who has a number of medical problems and uses a walker when she leaves her apartment, has fallen a number of times at home, twice having to be hospitalized. It’s clearly a serious business – especially if your bones have become brittle or you hit your head. Whenever there is ice on the ground, I think back to Dr. Robert Atkins, whose professional goals were to keep people healthy through their diets, and who slipped on ice in New York City, hit his head and that was it. How quickly things can turn.

Going back to Joe Lieberman, he and I were in the same law school class, Yale 1967. I really didn’t know Joe back then. He had also been a Yale undergraduate and knew those Yalies who had continued on to the law school, but was not one who was normally present during the activities of his law school classmates. He was always off doing political things. And even back then, everyone said that Joe was a politician and would become a Senator one day.

He did, of course, and moved to Washington. I saw him now and then at class “lunches”, something we did then, and then saw him more, when he became a semi-regular at Adas Israel services, at a time when I was an active board member and officer of the Congregation. He and his wife were involved in the synagogue’s primary day school, but he became disillusioned with Adas Israel after the day school left the synagogue to become independent, and the synagogue/school divorce was not pretty. I stayed at Adas (still there, and we are talking decades ago), but also became a Board of Directors member at the independent school. By then the Liebermans had aged out, I think. After that, I saw Joe largely at Law School functions, including our every five year reunions in New Haven, which he and I both religiously attended. He was in person as he seemed in public – warm, polite, friendly, and respectful.

It was of course exciting to see him run for the Vice Presidency on the Gore ticket and very disappointing when the Supreme Court first showed its political colors by intervening in the Florida race and deciding, on its own pretty much, who won the presidency. Gore and Lieberman bowed out; that was how things worked back then. But WWDJTD?

It was also interesting to see Joe win a Senate seat as an independent, after losing the Democratic primary, in 2006, even though he caucused with the Democrats. But he never went back to the Democratic Party, he supported John McCain for president over Barack Obama, and he ended his career (no longer in office) by embarking on the unrealistic No Labels attempt to run a third (or fourth or fifth or sixth) presidential candidate in 2024. No Labels has not yet identified, or at least has not yet publicly identified, a candidate and now may not do so. We will see.

In other words, Joe left a very mixed legacy. He did things his way, and sometimes that doesn’t work as well as expected.

Joe Lieberman was not the only high level national politician in my law school class. The other was Paul Tsongas, who was a Senator from Massachusetts and a leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1992.

Paul was very different at law school from the oft-missing Joe. And Paul and I were quite friendly throughout law school. He was one of the nicest guys I knew, but he never seemed to me very sure of himself. Working class background, Greek background – maybe these things made him feel isolated. He was very soft spoken, quite cerebral I thought, someone you could have a good conversation with. But he seemed to me to be somewhat lost during the law school years.

I remember a conversation we had during our third year. I was pretty clear where I was going after we graduated (of course, things turned out completely different from what I thought my clear path would be), but Paul had no idea. He didn’t want to practice law. He had no idea where he wanted to live. He was so tied into his Lowell MA community, but what could he really do there? And where else could he go? I remember him telling me that he was thinking about applying for (or maybe he had applied for ) a clerkship with the District Judge in American Samoa, and he thought he might go there (and never be heard from again).

He didn’t go to American Samoa – he got involved in politics, and found his surprising niche. He probably would have run for president as the Democratic candidate if it weren’t for Super Tuesday and a guy named Bill Clinton. Had he run and won, I guarantee you he’d never have fooled around with Monica Lewinsky.

Sadly, Paul had come down with lymphoma in the 1980s and, although it seemed he had been cured, it came back and he died in 1997, when he was only 55. It was a year after my sister, age 49, passed away from the same disease.

At any rate….a lot to think about today. I’ll think about something else tomorrow. I hope.

I graduated from Harvard in 1964. For those of you who are good in math, you might have already realized that means it is almost time for my 60th college reunion. The reunion is at the end of May, and I don’t plan on going, but I did go to a lunch yesterday that was billed as a preliminary to that important event. About 15 of the 90 1964 Harvard graduates who live in the area showed up. We had, among others, a doctor, a physicist, a statistician, a poet, a diplomat, an economist, a journalist and a bunch of lawyers. I knew one of them and recognized three others; everyone else was a total stranger.

The lunch was at the University Club, a downtown eating (and sleeping) club that has been around probably longer than I have. Through the decades I have been in Washington, I have been to a significant number of lunch events there, but I haven’t set foot in the building for over a decade. The first floor is still beautifully attired and the meeting rooms on the second floor still deadly dull. Our $55 lunch consisted of mini-wraps, a bag of potato chips, a green salad, and little lemon and chocolate wedges. Probably worth about $10. No one, on the basis of this meeting, is going to join that club.

A couple of statistics for you to mull over: People who were 81 or 82 (our age now) when we were born were themselves born in 1862 or 1863. People who attended their 60th reunion when we were graduating from college had graduated from Harvard in 1904. You can let that sink in.

Everyone at the lunch got to stand up and say whatever they wanted to say. The first person told his life story from the day he was born until he walked that morning into the University Club, and that sort of set the tone for everyone else. It was interesting, to be sure, but don’t worry if you missed it. I have already forgotten most of what was said – people were born, they went to high school, they liked their Harvard experience, their career has been interesting (some careers more interesting than others), they have or have not downsized from their houses in the DC area, they think the world is falling apart, they are worried about what they are turning over to their grandchildren and Donald Trump scares them to death.

There is something else we all seem to agree on. The Harvard of 2024 is not the same as the Harvard of 1964, and it was a much better place and institution back then. It’s not so much the Claudine Gray episode (her testimony before Congress and her alleged plagiarism) as it is the experiences that Jewish students on campus are having today. Some of those who previously have donated to Harvard appear to have stopped donating (except for two who said that they are still donating to Harvard’s Hillel). Some reported what children or grandchildren who have recently been at Harvard have been saying, and it isn’t pretty. We all noted that there had never been any clashes between groups of students when we were at Harvard, and that no one appeared to feel uncomfortable because of religious or ethnic background. We did not talk about race – there were no Black class members at the lunch (there weren’t that many at the school when we were there).

We didn’t really have a chance to discuss in detail what we felt were the causes of the current situation, and we all realize that Harvard is not the only university facing the same problems. And while clearly the Gaza war was a catalyst, it was felt that the problems go well beyond that. We did talk about the fact that the Jewish student body at Harvard today is only about 1/3 what it was when we were undergraduates, and that this is largely the result of attempts to diversify the student body; there seemed to be differences of opinions of whether this was inevitable, and whether it is for the overall betterment of society. We did not talk about the overall issues of how the social sciences are being taught everywhere today (oppressors vs. the oppressed; colonialists vs. indigenous populations – and how Jews in the Middle East are viewed as oppressors and colonialists, whereas Jews view themselves as always on the edge of being victims exiled from their homes or worse). This did not come up, although it probably would have been the next topic.

At any rate, in addition to the feelings expressed (by Jews and non-Jews) at the luncheon (although the Jewish class members have perhaps the strongest feelings), I learned of at least two classmates who did not attend the luncheon in part (at least) because of how they view Harvard today, and of several who are not going to Cambridge for the reunion because of these feelings. There was also concern stated that the reunion agenda (which had programs on climate change and world peace, etc., contained nothing on Jews (or other ethnic groups) at Harvard being, or feeling themselves to be, under attack, or about the situation at the university in general.

O tempora, o mores. (That’s Latin – do they still teach Latin at Harvard?)

How is it possible that Donald Trump may again become president of this country?

I don’t know how many of you read about the interview Trump gave to Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom (Israel Today) yesterday, but this one interview alone should be sufficient to convince everyone that a vote for Trump should be added to the list of Deadly Sins.

First, as he has done in the past with regard to anything bad happening in the world, he blamed the Hamas October 7 attack on Joe Biden, saying that “[Hamas] would have never done that attack if I were there”. He said that it was because Hamas “has no respect” for Biden (the implication being that Hamas really respects Trump). He has of course said this as well about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It is all the fault of Joe Biden and his weakness.

Perhaps remarks like this have become so commonplace that most Americans would simply roll their eyes and go on with their lives. But what else Trump said in that interview is more serious. I quote Trump (the translations come from the English language Haaretz article on the interview) speaking about Biden:

“He can’t put two sentences together. He can’t talk. He’s a very dumb person. His foreign policy throughout 50 years has been horrible.”

He went on and said:

“In Israel I get 98 percent of the vote……”…we have a lot of people in the United States who are Jewish but they actually fight Israel, look at the New York Times. It’s a Jewish family. I think they hate Israel. I watch what they write in the New York Times. It’s hysterical.”

And:

“How could a Jewish person vote for Kamala Harris? And essentially, you know that’s what probably is going to happen because you look at this guy, he can’t walk down a flight of stairs, he can’t walk across a room. He can’t find the exist to a stage without five different sets of stairs. You might have Kamala Harris if this doesn’t work out. Something happens to him, and you have her. She supports the enemy, but he supports the enemy, too.”

We here in DC know our three electoral votes will go Democratic. But what can we do to influence voters in other places? We gotta do something. I checked Real Clear Politics polls this morning. Still have Trump ahead in most of the states that should be competitive. Time is growing shorter, if not short.

But life is uncertain. Look, for example, at what happened early this morning in Baltimore, when a Singaporean-flagged 1000 foot long cargo ship ran into a pillar holding up the Francis Scott Key Bridge on the Baltimore Beltway, causing untold damage, injury and death. No one predicted this – an entire bridge suddenly down into the Patapsco River, cars under water, construction workers dead, commuter routes destroyed, ships in Baltimore Harbor paralyzed. Who would have imagined that such a thing could happen?

And equally surprising things could happen in this election. We will have to wait and see. But, as we keep waiting for the political tide to turn, it hasn’t happened yet.

As Kurt Vonnegut said (again and again), “So it goes”. [“What???”. the younger generation says, “Kurt Who?? Don’t you mean Taylor Swift?”]

Of course some things are not surprising: (1) The Hamas attack (2) the Russian attack (3) the ISIS-K attack. But we treat them as surprises anyway – “We are shocked!!!”. Same will be true of a Trump victory.

So it goes.

As the first half of March brought us sunny, warm Spring weather, along with beautiful early flowering trees, I was ready for a complete change of season. But as of a few days ago, the skies darkened, the temperatures dropped, the winds picked up, the cold rains fell, and (as happens every year) my belief in the arrival of an early Spring was shaken. So, except for last night’s Megillah reading, I have stayed home over the weekend, and may lay a bit low for the next few days. Not that it c-c-c-c-cold outside (it’s in the low 50s), but it’s colder than the 65-75 we had been experiencing over the past few weeks.

Some of my time this weekend was spent reading a book titled Winter Journal by writer Paul Auster. Auster too was hibernating during a cold winter (his in New York), holing up in a small studio he was renting, writing a different sort of a blog (not on-line, so I guess not really a blog). And yes, he noted, too, how it was still cold, even in March.

It’s a relatively short book, without chapters, but with little pieces (separated by a single blank line) that might be called biological tidbits. He is trying to explain himself; in fact, he is writing to himself, as seen by his consistent use of the second person. “You left the house”. “You flew to Paris, and then you….” . and so on. He is rethinking the story of his life. In non-chronological bits and pieces.

How did he decide which one piece followed another? I don’t know. But we have pieces about his growing up in New Jersey, his parents’ relationship and divorce, his experiences playing sports as a teenager, his early sexual stirrings and his later acting upon them, his move to Paris and the people he met there, his first marriage and its breakup, his second marriage (now about 40 years old), and so forth. Maybe they are in the order in which he wrote them. Maybe he spent months ordering and re-ordering them. Maybe he wrote three times this many, and threw the rest out. Or kept them in a file for a subsequent book. I don’t know.

It isn’t that I found his life overly fascinating, although it had its interesting moments to be sure. (I think he had more interesting moments in his life, for example, than I have had in mine…..and that isn’t a personal complaint, just fact, something I think may be true for most compared with me.) It isn’t that I found him someone to necessarily admire; in fact, I ended the book feeling nothing for him one way or the other. He clearly made a lot of early mistakes, but he clearly profited from some of them.

But the book reeled me right in, and I didn’t want to put it down. Largely, I think, this is because of the quality of his writing. He really writes well. And, by the way, we learn nothing of his other writings, or his film work, reading this book. That, like most of his interactions with his children, are left out. Maybe he has written about that elsewhere, I don’t know.

Many of the subjects he chooses are subjects that I choose from time to time writing my blog, although his skill far surpasses mine. And, to be sure, I don’t sit all day in a studio working on this blog. Usually, I sit down for maybe 30 minutes and often (as you probably have guessed) don’t proof it, much less gone back to alter it or polish it.

At any rate, I am sorry I have finished Winter Journal. I would like to have read more of his Paul Auster’s tidbits.

Only one of his entries seemed out of place, and I wonder why he included it. Along with all of the other pieces in the book, each of which discussed elements of his life or maybe touched upon his parents’ lives before he was born, but for one. In one long entry, he talked about a movie he saw one night when he couldn’t sleep. A film from the 1940s or 1950s, called Dead on Arrival, or rather D.O.A. He discussed this film in almost scene by scene detail – a businessman from southern California takes a solo business trip to San Francisco, orders a drink at the bar, gets sick, learns that the drink contained poison and that there is no cure and he will die within 48 hours, and spent the remainder of the film successfully tracking down the individual who poisoned his drink, discovering the the murderer thought something about him and wasn’t even true, so that his death was going to be a mistake.

This description comes about 75% through the book. Random, it seems. But maybe Auster found a hidden message there, although his only comment was to wonder what he would do if he found himself in the same position with only 40 years to live. He was 64 when he wrote that book, and clearly was feeling his age. Now, he is 77 and, I assume, feels it even more.

I saw a film yesterday, too. A film starring Caesar Romero and Lois Maxwell, from 1952, called The Lady in the Fog. I could tell you the complete plot, just as Auster told me the complete plot of D.O.A. But I won’t.

I will only tell you one thing. Have you ever heard of Lois Maxwell? No? Well, you have probably seen her in several films. She found her niche a little later. When she became Miss Moneypenny in all of the Sean Connery James Bond films. You learn something new every day.

As I think I have said before, there were other years when I published a blog. One of those years was 2009, and I have a print out of the entire blog. I wasn’t as religious as I have been with my current blog, which is published every day, but I probably did write something two or three days a week, of various types and various lengths, so there is a lot to look at. And last week I decided to look at it, and last night I finished reading through the entire year.

Now we are talking about 15 years ago, and it turns out I was quite busy that year – restaurants, concerts, books, a couple of trips. The usual. And I kept a record of it all, for whatever reasons I had at the time. And, although I was still practicing law then, I didn’t mention anything about my work at all.,

As I read through my year of 2009, what surprised me the most is how much I don’t remember. You could divide my year into three categories – things I remember, things that I had forgotten about but remember once I am reminded of them, and things that look to me like they must have been experienced by someone else. And – although I didn’t count things up and the three segments feel relatively equal – I wouldn’t be surprised if the category “things I have forgotten about completely” were the biggest.

For example, on March 30, 2009, I noted that I had read Andre Maurois’ biography of Disraeli, and that I had, in 2008 read his biography of Shelly. Now, I could tell you a fair amount about these books (not everything of course, but a fair amount) today. But that’s not because I read them in 2008 and 2009. I read them again in 2022 or 2023, as part of my reading through many of my Penguin paperbacks. They were both interesting books, relatively short and undoubtedly not complete, but containing enough information to give you a good sense of what Shelly and Disraeli were like, or at least what Maurois thought they were like. But, to my knowledge and belief, I had no clue that I had read them 15 or so years earlier.

On the other hand, there are some things I remember well. I remember going to see both The Winters Tale (Shakespeare) and Arcadia (Stoppard) at the Folger Theater, but I don’t remember seeing four Chekhov plays (three as readings, one fully staged) at Theater J at all.

In August of 2009, we took a trip to Nova Scotia. I remember the ferry from Portland, and I remember a number of things we did in Nova Scotia, staying with my college roommate who has a summer house (it belonged to his Canadian father) there.

In Nova Scotia, I remember driving through the area where a UFO had supposedly landed in the not so distant past (Canada’s answer to Roswell), I remember buying a cap that I still have at a fish company, I remember seeing the Bay of Fundy and being surprised at how nice the town of Wolfville was, along with Acadia University there, I remember the nice provincial patrolman who stopped me for driving too fast, I remember the drive back through New Brunswick and our stopping at Fredericton on the way back, and so forth.

None of these memories made by post where I recapped our trip. In the post, I spoke about restaurants that I don’t remember at all, about museums (the Nova Scotia Museum of Art, which I didn’t like, and the Rossignol Cultural Center, which I did) that I can’t imagine that I went to, or the Joggins Fossil Cliffs that we apparently visited (and were fascinated by) near Truro.

The only things in my note that I really remember about Nova Scotia was the casual dinner party that my roommate’s neighbor hosted, and the cemetery where victims of the Titanic are buried anonymously, some on the Christian side, and twelve (I think) on the small Jewish side of the cemetery. And I don’t know why my notes didn’t mention the pedestrian signs in hilly Halifax, which simply say “Slippery Slope”.

But there’s more. The entry on our trip talked about us stopping in Ridgefield CT to see my sister’s stepson and his family, and then stopping in Kennebunkport Me to see friends of Edie and, at the same time, seeing daughter Michelle and her then boyfriend, who were vacationing in southern Maine at the same time. Now I do remember Ridgefield and Kennebunkport and some (not all) of the things my blog said we did there but, for some reason, I don’t at all remember those stops as being part of the same trip that led us to Nova Scotia. Even reading about it did not jog my memory to realize that this was the same trip.

Well, this is just 2009. I have lived every year since 1942. (That’s why I am 80+) In each of these years (most had 365 days, about 20 at 366 days), I have done a number of things every day. How many of these things do I remember?

OK, ask me about second grade, and I can tell you three or four things that happened at school (out of hundreds or thousands), but I can’t tell you anything that I know happened that year out of school, either after school or on weekends or during the summer. At all.

I guess I just never thought about this in this way before. About how much of my life is a mystery to me. About how much that has happened I have no clue about. I guess the moral is: if you want to know how much you have forgotten, keep a diary.

We know that the Hamas (grogger roll) October 7 attack would probably never have happened if Israeli officials had paid attention to the lower level Israeli intelligence figures who concluded, well before October 7, that Hamas (grogger roll) was preparing for an attack, and that Hamas (grogger roll) was being very clever in its preparations. And we know that the reaction of the right wing Israeli government (grogger roll) under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu (grogger roll) has been to avoid any admission of failure or error, and to double down on the response to Hamas (grogger roll) to the extent that, presumably, 30,000+ Palestinians have died, and hundreds of thousands are in dire need of food and water.

Today we are reading about an attack on a rock concert venue in a Moscow suburb, where at least 150 Russians have been killed and an equal number injured. We have learned that United States intelligence had, over the past several weeks, become aware that groups were planning an attack on a crowded event (or multiple events) in Russia, and had warned the Russian officials (grogger roll), who apparently completely ignored the warnings, and considered it (I suspect) American disinformation. Now that the attack has occurred, these Russian officials, starting with Vladimir Putin (grogger roll), are also doubling down on the response, not admitting any fault, and will most likely strike out in ways that will be unfortunate, to say the least.

Do we see a pattern here? If so, what is it? It isn’t, as one might suspect, that there were intelligence failures, because there haven’t been (at least, not complete intelligence failures). It’s that intelligence is only good if it is acted upon, and is of no value if it to be ignored. And just as death is inevitable for everyone, and taxes inevitable for all but the very wealthy and the tax cheats, terrorist attacks are also presumably something approaching inevitable against those who belittle intelligence, or who decide to play the odds when it is not convenient to do otherwise.

About 25 years ago, when Russia was engaged in a war within its internal Chechnya Republic, and Putin had just come into power, there were a series of explosions in apartment buildings in Moscow, killing several hundred people. The explosions were immediately blamed on the Chechens, and several were arrested, and the war against the potentially breakaway republic was immediately intensified. Later, speculation grew that the bombings were not orchestrated by Chechen rebels, but by the Russian FSB (successor to the KGB) itself as a way to galvanize increasing hate against Chechnya so that the war could be intensified (as it was).

The current concert hall tragedy has been claimed by a group known as ISIS K as their doings, but my guess is that somehow Putin (grogger roll) will find a way to blame it on Ukraine. In fact, I have just read that seven men have been arrested, and that they (I don’t think they have been publicly identified yet) were caught trying to escape from Russia over the Ukraine border (of course). Is it a coincidence that this event occurred just days after Putin (grogger roll) won an election for another six years in power, and when protests have been staged across the country following the more than suspicious death of Alexei Navalny, Putin’s (grogger roll) would be rival for power?

The United States has thankfully been spared any large terrorist attacks since the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Towers in 2001. Sure there have been lone wolf attacks on several synagogues and other religious institutions, and there have been lone wolf attacks on schools and gatherings in places like Las Vegas and suburban Chicago, but none of these attacks have been by sophisticated, organized groups, and certainly none have been perpetrated by foreign terrorists. And, while this could change today or tomorrow, I think we have to thank our overworked law enforcement groups at every level, from the federal CIA and FBI down to local law enforcement in the smallest of communities. And we can only hope that our intelligence establishment is adequately staffed and funded as time goes on, and that any evidence that surfaces of potential attacks is taken seriously by those political leaders in a position to do something to shut down the threat.

Many, maybe most, schools and religious institutions have increased their vigilance and security, and that is all to the good (even though the fact they are required to do this is anything but good). But it seems like large gatherings in general are tempting to would be terrorists. The festival in the Negev Desert, where over 300 in attendance were murdered in October; the concert yesterday in Russia where over 150 have been killed. It appears that security at these venues (often private profit making venues, as opposed to churches and schools) may not be strong enough, and that more is needed. Clearly security at the Negev festival was lax, and – although I don’t know – I assume the same was true in Moscow.

It raises another question – even though on a percentage basis the odds are very small, should people think twice about going to any venue where security is limited – a concert, a cinema, a sporting event, a festival, a political rally? No one wants another COVID-type lock down for sure, but no one wants to be caught by a terrorist attack either.

It is unfortunate that we are now living in a country and an era where our governing bodies concentrate on the ridiculous and fail to address the important problems of the day, even those problems which are the easier to solve and which lack partisan intransigence. I fear that things will get worse before they get better. And not only do I fear this, but apparently younger Americans fear it even more, if recently polls and studies can be believed.

We have elections coming up. If, miracle of miracles, the Democrats control both houses of Congress and the Presidency, we have a chance to turn things around. If control is split between the two parties, we will continue our paralytic state, subject to whatever winds are blowing our way. If the Republicans control all three, heaven help us.

(The preceding paragraph was not a partisan statement, but rather a simple result of using one’s common sense.)

Chag Purim sameach.

(1) On Saturdays, sometimes, I go the synagogue. I also go to the synagogue on many major and minor holidays. For example, tomorrow night I intend to go to Purim services to hear the Meggillah Esther read. (Yes, I have heard it before). And with it comes a Purim spiel – this year (I am sorry to say) it has to do with Barbie (the film I couldn’t sit through) and I guess I am supposed to wear pink. Luckily, I have a pink kippah; that may do it.

On Tuesdays, sometimes, I go to church. The church I go to must at some point have religious services. After all, it looks like a church and has the name Episcopal in its title, but I go because on Tuesdays at noon, they have concerts. My attendance used to be more often than it has been, because I often have other things to do on Tuesdays, and more often I just forget. But this Tuesday, I did go and heard concert performed by a trio consisting of a viola, a cello and (no, not a violin) a flute. It was interesting, I thought.

They played three pieces. The first by French composer Albert Roussel (1869-1937) is titled Trio pour flute, alto et violencelle, Op 40. It was commissioned by American music patroness Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, and was premiered in 1929. I found it an odd piece – a combination of nice lyrical music, but with an undertone of dissonance and unease. I didn’t like it all. Why did he write it?, I thought. But then it dawned on me. 1929. A time of openness and progress, in life in general and certainly in the creative arts, but all with a underlayment of uncertainty and fear of the future. If this is what Roussel had in mind, he got it just right.

The second piece was called Whirlwind Variations, by a contemporary composer, Zach Davis, written for this group of musicians. The two short movements are called “calm” and “chaos”, and that’s what they were. I thought this piece a real winner – but the title did confuse me. Doesn’t a variation have to be a variation of something? Here we had two distinct movements – neither really a variation of the other (unless there is something that my non-musical brain missed in its entirety)..

The third piece? Beethoven’s Trio for strings, Opus 9, Number 3, written for violin, viola and cello. The violin part was re-scored for flute. And? I think it worked. On the other hand, there was probably a reason Beethoven wrote it for violin, don’t you think?

The musicians were Robert Cart, Wade Davis and Ivan Mendoza. Nice.

(2) We did watch a film on On Demand last night. Picked it for no good reason. May have heard of it before, but don’t remember if I did. It’s called “Carol” and stars Cate Blanchett (who I have to remember is not Kate Winslet, although their names are 100% the same in my mind) and Rooney Mara (who must have been born feet first; otherwise, why isn’t her name Mara Rooney?).

‘It turns out that this 2015 film had virtually unanimous positive reviews, won a number of awards, and was nominated for many, many more. It takes place in the early 1950s, and involves a young, struggling aspiring photographer and a somewhat older and much wealthier aspiring divorcee, who find each other and, while I don’t know if they really fall in love, develop a relationship that doesn’t go over well with the one’s would be husband, and the other, a reluctant divorcee who wants full custody of his child. It’s steady and well done all around.’It turns out that this 2015 film had virtually unanimous positive reviews, won a number of awards, and was nominated for many, many more. It takes place in the early 1950s, and involves a young, struggling aspiring photographer and a somewhat older and much wealthier aspiring divorcee, who find each other and, while I don’t know if they really fall in love, develop a relationship that doesn’t go over well with the one’s would be husband, and the other’s husband, a reluctant divorcee who wants full custody of his child. It’s steady and well done all around.

One of the later scenes takes place at a diner with the odd name of Spare Time Diner. I looked to see if it was a real place, and there it was (I think it may have recently closed) in a Kentucky suburb of Cincinnati. Now, the film takes place in New York City, Chicago, and Waterloo Iowa. But when I looked up the making of the film, I learned that it all was filmed in Cincinnati.

If you have Paramount/Showtime as part of your cable subscription, you may want to watch Carol. It’s based on Patricia Highsmith’s book The Price of Salt, which she wrote under the name Claire Morgan. Wikipedia quotes someone as saying it was the first lesbian novel with a happy ending. I don’t know how the book ends, but does the film end happily? To me, the film’s ending was unambiguously ambiguous. Maybe the book ended differently.