-
Hope
7 April 2026
Earth Rise as seen by the Artemis II crew on 6 April 2026 Waking to snowfall this morning—belated April Fooling from Mother Nature—surprised me out of the incipient MADD-ness (Mixed Anxiety-Depressive Disorder) that has too often characterized my first waking moments of late.
Snow falling in the view to the south, Madbury NH, 7 April 2026 
Daffodils braving the chill Accustomed to feeling overwhelmed by worries personal (the whips and scorns of time) and public (a world subject to the Felon-in-Chief’s latest indecency, obscenely venting mortal threats on Easter Sunday, no less), I suddenly remembered that the day before I had felt hopeful all day—such a rare occurrence. And so I decided to catalog all that contributed to that mood, and extrapolate from doing so a salutary formula, yearning to be able to retrieve hope at will. Here’s what happened, Dear Reader.
First, there was Easter Sunday, initially heralded by a rafter of turkeys, including one handsome Tom taking the place of the Easter Bunny.
Then came the comforting company of long-standing friends celebrating with a communal feast all the season’s hopeful renewals, sacred and secular. We all contributed—my now traditional offering was once again deviled eggs—and enjoyed both new acquaintances and catching up with the old, a gathering bracketed by the long drive separating Madbury NH from Newton MA where the daffodils are already in bloom.
Savory Easter eggs The schlep to and fro was nevertheless made delightful by convivial chat and a spectacular sunset painting the louring sky a luminous tangerine on the way north. My spontaneous recitation of opening lines from Richard III as we crossed the Tobin Bridge (“And all the clouds that loured upon our house / In the deep bosom of the ocean buried”) made my friends laugh, and made me feel less obsolete for having them in my head.
And then came Easter Monday, Angel Monday, recalling the arrival of the three Marys at the empty tomb where Jesus had been laid, only to be confronted by angels asking them whom they seek. The little four-line elaboration of the Easter Introit, the Quem Quaeritis trope (c. 923-934) marked the beginning of medieval liturgical drama:
Angel: Whom do you seek in the sepulcher, O followers of Christ?
Marys: Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified, O heavenly ones.
Angel: He is not here; he has risen as he foretold;
go announce that he has risen from the sepulcher.
Marys: Alleluia! The Lord has risen!
Elements Theatre Company approaching Pisa Cathedral to perform the
Quem Quaeritis trope in May 2016Without that impulse to turn liturgy into drama, a development that later collided with the Renaissance recovery of classical texts, including the Latin plays of Plautus and Terence that my boy Will would have translated at the King Edward VI school in Stratford-upon-Avon, I never would have had those opening lines of Richard III in my noggin to tickle my friends. Connection, to each other, to the past, to what one has learned over a lifetime, is the dispeller of despair, progenitor of hope. Connecting with my art historian friends was key, for our Easter dinner had united these disciplinary colleagues, and it had been Mara the medievalist who reminded me that Easter Monday was also known as Monday of the Angel. Joan Didion was right: we tell ourselves stories in order to live. And stories connect us both to each other and to our past, giving the present a consoling context.
Serendipitously, another former colleague, art historian Anne Leader, had recently sent me a link to her “Meditations on the Death of Jesus,” part of her “Art History with Anne Leader” blog on Substack and an occasional piece offering both a lesson and a spiritual invitation which she had first prepared for the annual prayer vigil of the First Presbyterian Church of Auburn, Alabama back when we were all cloistered by COVID in the spring of 2020. The thirteen devotional texts Anne chose are moving, and her glossing of the art that illustrates them (much of which I’d traveled to visit over the years) again filled me with hope: fine scholars continue to connect us to the humanity we crave, and they find evermore accessible ways to do so.
Giotto’s moving Lamentation (1303-05), part of his masterful fresco cycle depicting the lives of Mary and Jesus in the Cappella Scrovegni, Padua: now easily available to all online Technology that has so often filled me with dread now seemed inviting and even inspiring.
And so, while waiting at Wentworth Douglass Hospital in Dover for a post-op checkup with the wonderful APRN Royce, who had helped me through a hernia operation back in December (one of the many replacements and repairs that 70+-year-old flesh is heir to), I decided to fire up my phone to check on the Artemis II crew. Suddenly, as I sat in the waiting room, there they were, right there on my phone, broadcasting live as they approached the far side of the moon, boldly going (in Star Trek parlance) where no man has gone before.
The Artemis II crew, l. to r. Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen, Commander Reid Wiseman, Mission Specialist Christina Koch, and Pilot Victor Glover 
Total solar eclipse viewed from spacecraft Orion on 6 April 2026 But this intrepid voyager was not just a man, but a diverse crew, including a Canadian, an African American, and a woman—the Felon-in-Chief’s DEI nightmare. My mind was blown. How was it possible that they were broadcasting, live, to me, as they cruised toward the undiscovered country, 252,756 miles from Earth, and I sat in the hospital waiting to see if my hernia was indeed fully repaired?
I carried my phone into the exam room to show Royce. He not only marveled along with me at our connection to the Artemis crew, but also pronounced me entirely healed; robotic laparoscopic surgery is another technological miracle. Lifted as I was by this good news and by the humility of these brave, brilliant astronauts, I extended my checkup by asking Royce if he’d had a good holiday. A real conversation ensued: I shared a tip about how best to peel hard boiled eggs (steam them for 15 minutes and then plunge them into ice water) and told him of my reunion with friends of 30+ years; he told me a similar tale of invaluable old friends and went on to speak of uplifting video clips he’d recently seen illustrating the wise humanism of the former First Couple (Barack: world leaders can also be stupid; Michelle: rich and famous is not something devoutly to be wished).
I left the hospital feeling better than I’d felt in a long time—so much so that I went on connecting, linking by email my former colleague at Centre College and good friend Bill Levin with his fellow Renaissance scholar Anne Leader, and jumping out of my culinary rut with a new pasta primavera recipe from the New York Times. Feels good thus exiting the Slough of Despond.
And so, Dear Reader, reminded that even an April snowfall can be beautiful, I conclude this belated paschal message with the reminder that E. M. Forster’s epigraph to Howard’s End, which I once put on a poster advertising a new Humanities course, remains accurate and compelling: “Only connect.” Connect with your friends, connect with the past, value what the arts have to teach, share your expertise, marvel at and celebrate the best that humans can achieve when they cooperate.
There may well be hope for us after all.
Astronauts Koch (top left), Hansen (bottom left), Wiseman (bottom right), and Glover (top right) sporting their eclipse glasses 
-
Bridging the Gap with Living Art
Beatrice (Sehnaz Dirik), Eddie (Jorge Rubio), and Catherine (Naomi Kim) in Apollinaire Theatre Company’s production of Arthur Miller’s
A View from the Bridge (photo by Darlene DeVita)In his 1960 introduction to the Viking Compass edition of his 1955 play A View from the Bridge, Arthur Miller wrote of how rarely a play gets a second chance: it “makes its mark right off or it vanishes into oblivion.” He goes on, however, to examine the success of both that play and The Crucible following their initial failure to find large audiences for their original Broadway productions. After a couple of years, Miller writes, Crucible was produced again off Broadway and ran two years–without a line changed from the original. With McCarthy dead, Miller asserts, the play’s humanity could finally be enjoyed as drama and not as an unaesthetic special plea. With Bridge, however, Miller revised his original one-act drama, which then under Peter Brook’s direction ran with great success as a two-act play first in London and then in Paris. Miller attributes that transformation in part to the demands of different production exigencies: British actors could not reproduce the Brooklyn argot the characters speak, but, accustomed to playing Shakespeare, they could most certainly incorporate into a seemingly realistic play the mythic, larger-than-life quality the play demanded.
Miller’s take on the relationship between play and the time and place in which it is produced got me thinking about the work of art and its context-dependent reception. The serendipitous tension between naturalism and epic theatre that Brook’s production of A View from the Bridge achieved in London in 1956 London was equally successful in David R. Gammons’s production of that play at Chelsea’s Apollinaire Theatre, whose final performance I was privileged to see on 22 March.
Scenic design for A View from the Bridge by Joseph Lark-Riley Joseph Lark-Riley’s handsome set conflated the eponymous bridge with the Carbone family living space, ironically highlighting the conflicts that finally cannot be “bridged” without catastrophe: the old world code of culture rooted in honor and vengeance challenged by a new order of American possibility via the Red Hook docks; the protectiveness of a father figure challenged by forbidden desire; the law rendered impotent before the complexity of human nature.
All the characters in Gammons’s production were stylized, larger than life, half real and half mythic: the strong, dark Marco (Rohan Misra), the gamine innocent Catherine (Naomi Kim), the passionate and frustrated wife Beatrice (Sehnaz Dirik), the unsettlingly charismatic Rodolpho (Andrew Molano Sotomayor), and the tormented, tragically deluded Eddie (Jorge Rubio). Rodolpho’s dangerous charm, his threat to Eddie’s understanding of himself, his family and community, was powerfully evoked by the longshoremen Eddie, Louis (David J. Kim), and Mike (Andre Meservey) performing as an alienating trio grotesquely barking stylized laugher while ghoulishly uplit from below. The family mimed dining noisily from bowls, seated around a non-existent table, juxtaposing the real and the imagined. And the plight of the plot’s illegal immigrants, together with Eddie Carbone’s fatal, unresolved attraction to both his niece Catherine and the handsome Rodolpho, bridged the gap between the play’s reception in 1956 London and its revival in 2026 Chelsea, MA. Resonating with contemporary fears of I.C.E. and the toxic masculinity of the Trump era (watch Pete Hegseth thump his chest), Arthur Miller’s play retains its power and relevance 21 years past Miller’s death and 70 years since its composition. The play’s narrator, the lawyer Alfieri (a cool but compassionate Dev Luthra), enjoins us, however ambivalently, to “settle for half,” to make do with less. “I am inclined to notice the ruins in things” he says, “perhaps because I was born in Italy.”
Well, the serendipity of my seeing this excellent production within a week of Saturday’s No Kings rallies—8 million people, 3,300 events, the largest single-day nonviolent protest in modern American history—made me consider what bridges connect us with Miller’s art and the degradations of the Felon-in-Chief. Plenty of my fellow citizens have noticed the ongoing ruination of the American experiment, from demolishing the East Wing of the people’s house to murdering citizens asserting their Constitutional rights, and these people have something to say, apparently unwilling, unlike Alfieri, to settle for the current status quo. Like other Granite Staters braving the cold while waving signs on the median in Dover’s Lower Square on Saturday, I witnessed many more gestures of support (honks, raised fists, peace signs, flags flown through moon roofs) from passersby than middle fingers. One apparent neo-Nazi with his German shepherd dissed us protestors as “retards,” boasting his superior German genes (really?). But he was alone. The other company was uplifting, and many of their signs witty (my favorite: “Cholesterol! Why hast thou forsaken us?).
Then yesterday I returned to Boston for Boston Ballet’s final performance of two ballets, one Sir Frederick Ashton’s revered 1964 reduction of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream reimagined as his one-act The Dream, and the other a world premiere work by My’Kal Stromile, The Leisurely Installation of a New Window.
Oberon (Jeffrey Cirio) and Titania (Chisako Oga) in Boston Ballet’s The Dream (photo by Brooke Trisolini) The Dream’s romantic, enchanted woodland set (complete with obligatory ground fog), ethereal fairy costuming, and beautiful dancing leavened by broad humor and a spectacular Puck could not have been more delightful, though I confess my long acquaintance with Shakespeare’s script made me miss the depths lost by Ashton’s cutting both the first and fifth act of that play. The play, not the ballet, is finally about the saving grace of art, most particularly the living art of theatre, and the enduring boon of imagination, themes less apparent without the framing plot of Athenian cruelty transformed to loving acceptance.
At the ballet I was still thinking about the longevity of Miller’s art, and the relevance of his View from the Bridge as well as the previous day’s No Kings protests when Stromile’s The Leisurely Installation of a New Window began, a ballet in three movements adapting Hegel’s dialectical method of progress through contradiction (thesis-antithesis-synthesis) into a meditation on how systems have to be lived in before they can be questioned and shifted from inherited structures to new possibilities. Featuring a Seeker often studying a book and thus honoring tradition, the ballet adds the People, and the Reformers who create patterns that repeat, loosen, and change. Two male dancers perform a pas de deux while engaging the book; meanwhile a trio upstage forms and reforms. Commissioned as a celebration of the ballet at a pivotal 250th moment in America, Stromile’s Installation of a New Window, set to a challenging score by music director Mischa Santora with electric guitar solos by Reeves Gabrels, a member of the rock band The Cure and former Bowie collaborator, left me wondering what future can be glimpsed through a new window, framing what’s to come.
So, Dear Reader. Here’s to new windows, reformers, bridges kept intact, and the living, performing arts.
-
Winter Experience; Reprise and Reprieve
10 March 2026
The Bellamy River flows downstream, ice bonds loosened Winter’s ice bonds cracked wide open for me last Sunday. Thanks to Boston Ballet and now sprung forward to Daylight Saving Time, I am no longer frustrated by my unfulfilled quest for what my wise friend and artist Carol terms the meditative, “existential break” of art, a reprieve from a very long winter of discontent. The runup to this spiritual breakthrough had been disappointing as I gadded about seeking some salutary revelation, or at least reassurance from someone or something. Last Thursday that search took me to Portsmouth’s Music Hall for an evening with Gavin Newsom, himself gadding about promoting his new book, Young Man in a Hurry.
The largely partisan audience was of course jazzed by the just-announced firing of the much-detested Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, a woman blinded by self-promotion and completely oblivious to the iniquities her ignorance perpetuated. And Governor Newsom was both articulate and vehement about the necessity of fighting executive overreach with tough legislative action—“fighting fire with fire.”
Gov. Newsom with host podcaster Jack Cocchiarella at Portsmouth’s Music Hall, 5 March 2026 Newsom’s focus, however, was certainly promotion of his book as prelude to presidential candidacy. And he never addressed the fear that roils my friends of late: tampering with or even prohibition of the next election. My heart was no less heavy when I left the Hall.
So, I hoped for more of a lift from Joshua Harmon’s new play We Had A World now at the Huntington’s intimate Wimberly Theatre in Boston’s Calderwood Pavilion. I’d heard Harmon speak of the play’s genesis, a request from his grandmother to tell their family story sparing none of the recriminations and bitterness; Harmon himself called it “my crazy, personal, super-specific play about my nana.”
Courtney O’Neill’s handsome set for the Huntington’s We Had A World A playwright’s autobiographical play about his particular family romance and an indomitable matriarch of course conjures Tennessee Williams’s devastating memory play The Glass Menagerie, and unfortunately We Had A World suffers from the comparison. Well-acted and occasionally amusing but episodic and finally, for me, unengaging, I missed the moving, transporting vision of the personal made universal, and stayed stuck in bleak winter mode.
But the next day, the artists of Boston Ballet came through for me with their “Winter Experience.”
Stravinsky has said that the “violent Russian spring” that seemed to begin in an hour was like the whole earth cracking . . . “the most wonderful event of every year of my childhood.” Together with Nijinsky’s choreography first presented in Paris by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes on 29 May 1913, Le Sacre de Printemps/The Rite of Spring shocked its audience into shouting, hissing pandemonium. Jorma Elo’s Sacre, last performed by Boston Ballet in 2009, with Stravinsky’s score presented in a new arrangement for reduced orchestra by former Boston Ballet assistant conductor Alyssa Wang under music direction by Mischa Santora, no longer shocks, but it does command. Nijinsky’s choreography challenged classical form with feet turned in, knees slightly bent, and arms held in “prehistoric posture.” Globe critic Jeffrey Gantz nailed the perfect correspondence of Elo’s choreography and Stravinsky’s score: body parts move in isolation from one another like Stravinsky’s instrumental lines. “Dancers crawl backward, stiff-legged, as if de-evolving.” The story’s controlling overlord of the community pushes his victim’s head down or chops at her throat as the stomping pulse of the music evokes a cross between Jurassic Park and nature red in tooth and claw: the violent, ruthless competition of the natural world. Yet the doomed victim of this savage community in Elo’s version ends the struggle with a satisfying gesture of feminist defiance.
Jeffrey Cirio and Ji Young Chae in Elo’s Sacre du Printemps, photo by Brooke Trisolini Okay. I was on the road to recovery. And then after intermission a stunningly cohesive vision of group dynamics arrived with Crystal Pite’s The Season’s Canon, premiered with the Paris Opera Ballet in 2016 and first performed by Boston Ballet in October 2024 to Max Richter’s “Recomposed: Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons Selections.” Beginning with an ephemeral evocation of spring arriving via a virtual nebula, the reflected light backdrop design of Jay Gower Taylor and Tom Visser, the audience’s first vision of the 54 dancers grouped upstage right is an elemental undulating mass, more ocean swell than community.
Boston Ballet in Crystal Pite’s The Seasons’ Canon 
Haley Schwan and ensemble, photos by Rosalie O’Connor The men bare-chested and the women in flesh-colored tops, everyone in loose gray trousers, they perform murmurations more commonly observed in a flock of starlings. Individuals peep up, and are then subsumed by the group; there are chain-reaction and falling domino effects. The beauty of the collective, individuals moving as one, is the dominant and, I found, affirming theme, one awe-inspiring coup de théâtre after another. The snow that falls in the last movement, Winter, is as beautiful as that always stunning Nutcracker scene. But here, unrestricted by narrative, one experiences that beauty in the context of enduring seasonal cycles and the interdependence of humanity and nature. For me, this vision set to music both familiar and new did finally crack open the ice bonds of this challenging winter. If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
As it happens, not far at all. In fact, the ice bonds HAVE literally cracked. The maples along Nute Road are being tapped.
The temperature right now in Madbury is 74o, and I spied the first daffodils to break ground this morning, the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.
First daffs, 10 March 2026 Even shut in the cold, dark garage since last November, a pot of chrysanthemums has sprouted anew.
Dark and cold did not thwart these mums And lines from The Wanderer, the Old English poem preserved in the Exeter Book (c. 960-990) I labored to translate my first year of graduate school come back to me:
“So this middle-earth each of all days declines and falls; therefore a man cannot become wise before he has a portion of winters in the kingdom of the world.”
Spring is nigh. We are wiser for the winters passed. What’s next?
-
Snow Dazed
3 March 2026
Yardstick measuring plowed snow, 24 Feb 2026, Madbury NH The snow is falling AGAIN as I tap this out, Dear Reader, and much as this Florida cracker appreciates its beauty—somehow still a novelty after over 27 years in New Hampshire—enough is enough.
Hazardous garage exit Propane and plowing are pricey but necessary expenses these many days. And this past month has been a challenge in other ways, both on the home front and the world stage, where thanks to our Felon-in-Chief, we now find ourselves embroiled in yet another open-ended war in the Middle East, unconstitutional from its inception and untethered from any consistent rationale.
That’s the big stuff. But much smaller stuff still preoccupies. In the 23 days since a crash rocked my equanimity, I’ve recouped the insurance payment and bought a new car, the same model as my beloved but now totaled VW GTI, but with five more years of high tech features to reckon with. I spent 36 minutes beside Jimmy the salesman in the passenger seat asking basic questions about how things work; even he had to look up how to tune the radio, buttons and knobs having been replaced by screens with multiple layers of access. I now feel only slightly less anxious about driving this computer on wheels than when I exited Rochester Volkswagen in “Opal” (named for the color VW styles “white”) five days ago. I’ll adapt, and the heated steering wheel IS very nice, but the learning curve is and will continue to be steep.
Opal, almost as white as the snow I’ve also become stuck once again in the tar baby that is the 99-year land lease of commercial property in Ft. Myers that my maternal grandfather C. C. Senseman left his two children, my mother Virginia and my uncle Kenny, now both long gone, and the lease then inherited by their children, two of whom are also now departed, my beautiful blonde cousin Beverly and my equally beautiful blonde sister Jane. The 1967 lease was re-assigned in 2006 to an unscrupulous new renter, whose scofflaw lawyer brother has ever since taken advantage of what was always a bad deal for us joint landowners, Grandpa Senseman’s descendants. Consistently delinquent in paying the very modest rent for this property (atop one parcel of which sits the strip club Babe’s), this scoundrel has now stopped paying rent all together, having spontaneously decided to contest the rent due, an amount and payment schedule established in 1967 which he has paid, however tardily, for the last 20+ years. Jarndyce v. Jarndyce of Dickens’s Bleak House has nothing on a legal quagmire that has tormented four generations of my family with no resolution in sight.
The malfeasance of this unscupulous shyster of course pales in comparison with the high crimes and misdemeanors to which the Felon-in-Chief subjects my country and the world, but the fact that such damaging corruption continues uncurbed on so many levels is dispiriting. One looks for compensation in small victories: the Supreme Court disallows Trump tariffs; our Republican New Hampshire Governor Ayotte has to bow to the will of her protesting constituents and say no to the transformation of a Merrimack warehouse into an ICE detention center. And I managed to get my one-year-old microwave, unexpectedly rendered useless by a power failure during the latest blizzard, reprogrammed and operating once more. And just this morning, after a l-o-n-g campaign battling the New York Times’s inaptly termed “customer service” bots, I finally managed contact, however digital, with a human named Michel who was able to resolve a delivery cockup persisting since 26 January.
While such victories help sustain spirits, so does a friend’s success: on 22 February, Exeter’s Water Street Bookstore hosted Linda Rhodes’s launching her book, Breaking the Barnyard Barrier: A Woman Veterinarian Paves the Way, about her experience as a pioneering large animal veterinarian in the Wasatch Mountains of late 1970’s Utah.
Dr. Rhodes (r) regales us with a harrowing tale of a wounded and very angry bull A feminist triumph is always uplifting. And so, as I have so often found, is art, most recently a couple of fine films. As Ralph Fiennes, playing the choral master in The Choral, quoted Goethe, “A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.” H is for Hawk, the film rendering of Helen Mcdonald’s 2014 memoir, also helped to dispel my worldly cares last Sunday, at least for a few hours. Claire Foy, Brendan Gleeson, and Lindsay Duncan—and the number of goshawks playing “Mabel”—are well worth your time.
Claire Foy and Mabel in H is for Hawk And then there’s the reassurance of nature. I’m keeping mealworms mixed in with birdseed to coax the return of a bluebird who has made a few visits to my feeders of late. I haven’t spied the pileated woodpecker nearby, but I heard his cry the other day competing with my growling stomach’s borborygmus as I sat with my binoculars quietly searching. And I had a lovely albeit slightly illicit snowshoe adventure the other day navigating a former snowmobile trail now forbidden trespassers by an owner who has changed her mind about allowing machines on her property.
Turn-around point The snow was powdery but very deep, so that each snowshoed step could sink as much as 6-7 inches, requiring a lot of extraction effort. Okay, good for cardio, I thought. And I managed to find ways around the several places where little tributaries of still flowing water that ultimately becomes the Oyster River threatened to sink my progress. At one point I did, however, almost get stuck, and discretion, the better part of valor, kicked in. I was alone, no one knew where I was, and I’d just watched William H. Macy get clocked by a falling branch in the film Train Dreams I’d watched the night before. I re-traced my steps instead of forging on, and arrived safely back home, my hair plastered to my doubly capped head. The image reflected in the mirror gave me a welcome glimpse of my mother Virginia, who would have been happy for my safe return.
Madbury reservoir, accessed by a safer trail As for the astronomical, I missed this morning’s blood moon eclipse. I was at the window at 6.00 am, but the moon had already dipped below the tree line to the west, obscuring the setting sphere.
David Gray’s photography of a previous Blood Mood in Sydney (AFP via Getty) Maybe I’ll catch the next one in 2029. We’ll see how much blood there is under the bridge by then.
In the meantime, Dear Reader, hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day.
-
Intersection
17 February 2026
Morning snow, 11 February 2026 Today, Tuesday, 17 February 2026, marks the beginning of Ramadan, the celebration of Mardi Gras, and the Lunar New Year of the Horse, as well as the second anniversary of my sister Jane’s passing, and the birth of our twin granddaughters, now 24 years old. Is’t possible? What to make of such intersections, global and personal, past and present—especially given my shaken and stirred response to my car’s being totaled at the busy intersection of Madbury Road and Route 4 in Durham, NH a week ago Sunday? Dear Reader, that is the question. Seeing Hamnet for the second time one week post crash afforded me opportunity for a really good cry, but that has not settled the unsettled.
Accident scene, 8 Feb 2026 I’m off to a yoga class soon, to be followed by two different book club discussions later on, one on Shakespeare’s early play Two Gentlemen of Verona, exploring and exploding past comic conventions, and the other on Kiran Desai’s epic novel, The Inheritance of Loss, rendering the collision of private lives and public events arising from the effects of colonialism on those who leave India and those who remain. I’m grateful for such salutary distractions, physical and intellectual, and for the insights art affords. I’m grateful for the restorative company of dear friends joining over a delightful meal to speak, deeply, of all manner of things, celebrate Valentine’s Day, and toast our host’s cozy new home together. And I’m grateful that no one was seriously hurt when my car was hit, that emergency services and insurance company have been so helpful, and that the hours of daylight grow appreciably longer with each passing day. But what’s to come?
My friend SP, student of lunar cycles, has declared this Year of the Horse marks the beginning of a new one. Could be worse, could be better, but it will be different. I’m choosing to think things will get better, that perhaps the U.S. has reached a tipping point, that we’re finally waking up to take action against oppression and the psychic damage wrought by epistemic uncertainty.
I’ve certainly found myself in a new personal era of late, noticing more and more signs that I’m neither ascending nor even maintaining level flight, but am rather on the glide path down. I’m spending a lot of time—perhaps too much—thinking about offloading stuff and attending Death Cafés. What am I contributing? WordPress, host of this blog, reports my site had 442 visitors in January, so Dear Reader, I’m wondering what YOU are thinking? Have these messages in a bottle reached you? Do you also find yourself at the intersection of hüzün, the Turkish word I’ve just learned signifying melancholy and longing/spiritual yearning, and hope? I recently noticed that some Google bot describes this blog as “witty, entertaining, and thoroughly engaged with all manner of subjects . . . .” What does one make of a such a snippet, a compliment manufactured by an A.I. algorithm?
I don’t know. But I do remain curious. And I propose reviving a 16th century word now largely obsolete but I think useful in this new cycle: “respair,” meaning the return of hope after a period of despair, from the Latin respirare, to breathe again. Deep breath, Everyone! And like Jess Jackson, who departed this dimension earlier this morning, Keep Hope Alive!
Happy new year!
I am curious Squirrel, peeping into the bathroom, 15 Feb 2026 -
Distraction Confounded
29 January 2026
The Oyster River, seen from the Durham NH landing As the snow storm approached last Saturday, 24 January, I found myself in a rare if brief mood, focused and pleasantly anticipating both the coming snow and a lovely little tea party in New Castle to honor two friends with January birthdays, one 87 and one 89. Humans are hard-wired for certainty, leaping to embrace it, and even foolishly creating it when obscured by ambiguity or complexity. As I once heard Senator Ted Kennedy say: “For every complex problem there’s a simple solution. And it’s wrong!”
Winter Storm Fern was certainly coming; I saw it on the radar. And Walker Percy’s “hurricane theory” would, I knew, obtain. Disasters replace abstract anxiety with immediate purpose: survival and community solidarity. We feel alive and connected, no longer passive participants in daily routine. The unusually cold temperatures—it was 3o that morning, -16o with wind chill—meant the wetlands trail bordering our property would be frozen solid, with insulating snow keeping it perfect for snowshoeing later on. And the birthday party, laid on by a designer with exquisite taste, would, I knew, be lovely. The humiliation and frustration I had felt on Wednesday morning on hearing the inane, self-aggrandizing, and insulting ramblings of our Felon-in-Chief (FIC) addressing global leaders at the World Economic Forum temporarily ceded mental space to hospitality and gemütlichkeit (I recall the FIC telling this august group assembled in Davos, Switzerland that but for the U.S., they’d all be speaking German. This to a highly educated audience in Switzerland). Our New Castle hostess had suggested we keep politics out of her house, and we complied, even though we’d heard there’d been yet another shooting in Minneapolis.
And then I came home and watched the videos of an ICU nurse for the Veteran’s Administration help shield a fellow protestor when an ICE agent pushed her to the ground. For his brave compassion, true to his training and ethical service as a nurse, he was then surrounded by ICE agents, pushed face down to the ground, and summarily executed, his last act to help the helpless. Yet more blood on the hands of our abominable leader. A tipping point? I am not sanguine. I write to my representatives and senators and I protest, but I’m more scared than optimistic.
Alex Pretti, RN official portrait by US Dept. of Veterans Affairs Vladimir Iliyich Lenin is rumored (incorrectly) to have said “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.” January has felt like that, and it’s taking a toll on my emotional equilibrium: tears sprang to my eyes on hearing the calm and reassuring baritone of Robert Redford in a broadcast clip explaining why he created the Sundance Film Festival, first established by him in Salt Lake City in 1978 as the Utah/US Film Festival. Redford, Sundance himself, is gone, and his festival is leaving Park City, Utah for Boulder, Colorado next year, having outgrown its home for the past 45 years. I miss Robert Redford. I miss talent, generosity, and decency.
I try to stay in motion, seeking solace and direction in art, and certainly I’m not alone. The Winslow Homer exhibition at Boston’s MFA was mobbed on the Monday morning I joined the claustrophobic crush of mostly seniors (too many taking pictures) crowding the exhibition “Of Light and Air,” its title taken from Henry James’s review: “Mr. Homer has the great merit that he naturally sees everything at one with its envelope of light and air. He sees not in lines, but masses. Things come already modeled to his eye.”
Homer’s famously luminous but delicate watercolors with their all-too-fugitive colors were well served by the MFA (if not the online images I reproduce here); a video featuring artist James Prosek attempting to duplicate Homer’s technique and conservator Judith C. Walsh guiding Prosek and us through Homer’s studio on Prouts Neck in Scarborough, Maine (now managed by the Portland Museum of Art) provided helpful insight into Homer’s artistry.
Leaping Trout, Winslow Homer (1889) 
The Blue Boat, Winslow Homer (1892) All museums are suffering in our unenlightened era, however, and the MFA, confronting a widening structural deficit, has announced it will lay off 6.3% of its staff as part of a sweeping restructuring plan. So, I suppose we must forgive both the congestion of the Homer show and the commodification of his work.
Leaping Trout as Art Sox 
The Blue Boat as photo op From the Homer show, I made my way through the MFA to the Lynch and Servison galleries and the “Boston on the Eve of Revolution and the New Nation” show, and found myself once again sadly misty-eyed. What, I wondered, would Thomas Jefferson make of us now? What has become of the sacred honor those Founders pledged along with their land and their lives in this the 250th anniversary of their great experiment?
Thomas Sully’s monumental oil (12 x 17 feet) The Passage of the Delaware (1819) 
Thomas Jefferson (age 46), Jean-Antoine Houdon (1789) So I beat on, a boat against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
The personal past exerts a gravitational force, too, even as I pursue distraction. Case in point: I saw The Last Class, Elliott Kirschner’s 2025 documentary about Robert Reich’s final semester at UC Berkeley teaching his “Wealth and Poverty” class and so ending his 42-year teaching career while wrestling with his own aging and his students inheriting a world out of balance. Over my own 43 years in college and university classrooms, I certainly witnessed many of the changes Reich did, and worried as much about the morphing “idea of a university,” the title of a humanities course team-taught by my late husband. The next morning I dreamed I was part of a protest on the Berkeley campus while wearing a clown costume (!) and digging in my bag for makeup to refresh my red, white, and blue face paint (!), being late for class, and then sitting in a little school desk to take my GRE exam, from which I was summarily expelled as a protestor (!!!). I awoke worried that I had no cold cream to take off my grease paint.
Another attempt at salutary distraction was confounded by the final (and superb) 18 January performance of Tina Satter’s play Is This A Room by the Apollinaire Theatre Company at Chelsea Theatre Works just outside Boston, a thrilling verbatim transcription of the FBI’s interrogation of young Air Force linguist Reality Winner in June 2017.
In May 2017, Winner printed and mailed a classified NSA report to the news outlet The Intercept, which published the document. The report described efforts of Russian military intelligence to interfere with US election systems in 2016. Winner was subsequently arrested the same day she was interrogated and denied bail while awaiting trial. In 2018, she accepted a plea agreement and received a 63-month federal sentence, at the time the longest sentence ever imposed for leaks to the media. In 2021, Winner began three years of supervised release. The transcript/play, with Parker Jennings so engagingly portraying Winner, includes Winner’s confessing that having Fox News playing 24/7 in her workspace helped prompt her action.
Yesterday, 28 January, the FBI raided the Fulton County, Georgia Election Office, seizing original 2020 voting records, authorized by the Felon-in-Chief’s Justice Department to continue investigating his false claims of election fraud. And CNN reports that Minnesota Secretary of State, Steve Simon, has declined to hand over voter data demanded by Attorney General Pam Bondi because doing so would violate state and federal privacy laws. “Literally hours after the second, let’s not forget second, killing of an American citizen in the city of Minneapolis by ICE agents … there’s this term sheet,” he said, “this ransom note” (https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/27/politics/pam-bondi-voter-rolls-minnesota-ice). Extortion replaces the law of the land.
Even my two book clubs have inadvertently conspired to keep the roiling of our republic top of mind. Our Madbury Public Library group tackled Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet as well as Chloé Zhao’s film last week, and the Shakespeare discussion at the Portsmouth Public Library took up Hamlet the following Tuesday. O’Farrell’s novel is an almost too evocative representation of grief and Hamlet a tale of revenge in a poisonous court ruled by a murderous, fatally obsessed king. Oh, NO KINGS, please!
Where, oh where lies relief? Well, there is Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s principled and pragmatic speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos on 20 January. The date recalls not only a painful inauguration day (and by association the FIC’s attack on the Capitol), but also the loss of my sister Jane, born on 20 January in 1958. But Carney’s rational erudition (he quotes Thucydides, not Hannibal Lecter) and pellucid, persuasive rhetoric are a balm of reason. I recommend you read his plea for middle powers to “live in truth.” And then take peaceful political action. And make plans to go spend money in Canada, as I have.
Also, get a few bulbs growing indoors.
One wax-coated amaryllis bulb produces 2 buds, one with 6 blossoms and another on the way: “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower” And then, go spend some time outside, however cold it might be.
Sculler’s Shells at the Durham landing Nature helps us live in truth, as Duke Senior, in exile in the Forest of Arden knows:
. . . Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?
Here feel we not the penalty of Adam,
The seasons’ difference, as the icy fang
And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind,
Which when it bites and blows upon my body
Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say,
“This is no flattery; these are counselors
That feelingly persuade me what I am.” (As You Like It, 2.1.3-11)
As the historical sign at the Durham landing suggests, this, too, will pass.
Truth and reconciliation are ongoing. -
January Blues
11 January 2026
Capstone Farm, Hayes Road, Madbury NH As we head into mid-January, I’m finding myself uncomfortably empathizing with our volatile weather, alternating heavy rain warm enough to melt much of what had been a lovely (and brightening) snow cover with dropping temperatures that freeze my sloping backwards question mark of a driveway into a contorted luge course, making me even more chary than usual of a fall. In our crippled democracy, the horror hits just keep on coming, the latest the Minneapolis murder of Renee Good. My friend Carol was part of the protest in Dover yesterday, a photo of her and her sign (“COURAGE IS CONTAGIOUS! STAND UP NOW OR BOW DOWN LATER”) made USA Today. I, on the other hand, worrying about ice on the road as well as trigger happy ICE agents, went to Portsmouth not to protest but to see Ethan Hawke’s remarkable performance in Blue Moon. Wonderful script, acting, direction; devastatingly heartbreaking. Perhaps not the best choice to experience on a dark, cold day as I struggle with death cleaning resolutions and the ever more noticeable drag of aging.
Andrew Scott as Richard Rodgers and Ethan Hawke as Lorenz Hart in Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon (Sabrina Lantos/ Sony Pictures Classics) Today I went to a new year’s luncheon with many of my fellow Seacoast Village Project members, all of us hoping to be able to “age in place.” The noise of so many simultaneous conversations was deafening and defeating, especially for our hearing-impaired cohort. Missing one couple, fellow retired UNH academics I was looking forward to seeing, I learned the husband has been metaphorically kneecapped by sudden onset memory loss so aggressive that the couple has decamped to Connecticut to be closer to children. There was much talk of “being on the list” of our local continuing care facility, Riverwoods, awarded the sobriquet of “Neverwoods” by one fellow Villager, cleverly summing up what seemed to be the prevailing attitude. I count myself one determined never to leave our home, but staying here will take a LOT of finessing. And what if I’m on the short list for losing MY marbles? My lunch companion, a former dean at Syracuse whose expertise in the intersection of business and technology wafted him and his wife to a teaching gig in Switzerland for 22 years (The Beauty! The Wealth! The Social Services!) finds promise in a remarkable mobility device (see revimo.care) that can lift you up, move you around, and basically take the place of a strong human orderly. Provided, of course, that you keep enough marbles to be able to drive it.
The ReviMo Niko: the future? In the coming week I am at last cleared to return to the yoga classes I’ve been missing since the hernia repair that sidelined me at the beginning of last month. I’m hoping they will help alleviate the stiffness that sets in when I’m less mobile, and dispel some of the gloom attending my death cleaning, which arrived in earnest when I began the long-avoided task of sorting my late husband’s papers, beginning with a stack of personal emails he printed out and kept from the time we moved into our home in 2001 until he was overtaken by the debilitating anxiety that so altered both our lives beginning in 2006. A couple days ago I heard on NPR a report about a woman, age 102, whose children had unearthed in a storage space a trove of letters to their mother from her fiancé who died in WW2. She had put them away, married a different husband, had and raised their children, and never looked back at the letters until those children brought them to her. At which point she read them, and fell in love with her long-dead fiancé all over again.
This is both heartwarming—the heart IS a resilient muscle—and heartbreaking, and best describes what it’s been like to find my David, once again his full, remarkable self, in his lengthy correspondence with his brothers, his friends, his daughter. Witty, entertaining, and thoroughly engaged with all manner of subjects—music, movies, art, politics, the family romance, the woes of academia, astronomy, cars—they bring him back to life for me to adore and mourn afresh. Many of the correspondents are, like David, gone now. Some live on, and in a few cases when I think that person might like to have that letter, I’ve put it aside to pass along. Other letters that describe in detail one of the Andrew Murphy Commonwealth’s many adventures—some of which I had forgotten—I’ve kept for myself to re-read when I want to, or simply need reminding of just how much extraordinary fun we had together. The rest go to the silence of recycling.
Marcescence: the Beech in Winter Meanwhile I still await the new computer system that will replace the only sporadically working laptop I’m using to tap this out. Even it has little epiphanies to offer by way of the scenic views that thanks to Windows Spotlight show up on the lock screen after the Dell logo. The other day it was Delicate Arch outside of Moab, Utah, where we hiked so boldly at least twice, the first time in 1993 when we took the decidedly not marked path back to the parking lot by directly descending the steep sides of the red rock bowl below the looming Arch. And then the very next time I turned on the laptop, the scene was the naturally terraced travertine pools of Pamukkale, the “cotton castle” atop which the ancient city of Hierapolis, founded as a thermal spa in the second century BCE, sits. We were there together in 2013. We had a wonderful life.
Delicate Arch from the perilous perspective we shared in 1993 
The pools of Pamukkale, Turkey So on we go. I’ll continue salving my nostalgia with art: tomorrow the Winslow Homer watercolor show at Boston’s MFA, next Saturday the documentary film of Robert Reich’s Last Class, next Sunday a well-reviewed production of Is This a Room? at Chelsea Theatre Works, Tina Satter’s true-life psychological thriller, a verbatim FBI transcript of the interrogation of Reality Winner, a young Air Force linguist accused of leaking a classified document about Russian interference the 2016 U.S. elections. And George Saunders has a new novel coming out on the 27th. In the meantime, I’ll keep watching re-runs of The West Wing on Netflix, a vision of what it would be like to have super intelligent, ethical, heroic political operatives running things. I’ve made it to Season Three, gobsmacked by the topical prescience of the first two seasons, 1999-2001, which inversely, sadly illuminate the world we live in a quarter century on. What’s to come is still unsure; I think it will get worse before it gets better. But on we go.
Winter companions at Capstone Farm -
Transition
20 December 2025
The Bellamy River toggles between temperature swings, topping ice and snow with flowing surface water Koyaanisquatsi, Dear Reader, is a Hopi word that translates to “life out of balance” or “a state of living that calls for another way of living.” Koyaanisquatsi is also the title of 1982’s wordless documentary directed by Godfrey Reggio with music by Philip Glass and cinematography by Ron Fricke. That film made a big impression on me—and on my late mother Virginia, who had my husband David spell it out on the chalkboard she kept in her Clearwater apartment so she could put a name to how she experienced life much of the time. So, on this Saturday night, it’s not surprising that the past week’s events have repeatedly brought both film and term to mind, even as I so clumsily tap this out on my laptop keyboard, accustomed as I am to the much more familiar setup of remote keyboard and mouse disrupted last week by a Microsoft update that rendered that arrangement unusable until tech support can arrive come Monday. Oy.
The times are out of joint. The season’s prompts to comfort and joy repeatedly collapse into horror and outrage. First last Saturday came the all-too-common report of yet another school shooting, this time during a final exam at Brown. Then on Sunday, another mass shooting, this time on a Sydney beach during a Hanukkah celebration. And then most terribly, perhaps because the victims were so well known and loved by so many, sometime in between those horrors came the savage murder of Rob and Michele Reiner, apparently at the hands of their middle child, Nick, news made even worse by the appalling, deranged response of that loathsome troll, our Felon-in-Chief, the leader of the free world Koyaanisquatsi indeed.
Open water now on the Madbury reservoir after last week’s warm rain Inevitably, even horror and disgust temper in the course of a week’s passing. But tomorrow at 10.03 am, the winter solstice arrives in Madbury, New Hampshire, along with the shortest day of the year. The light will return. But what of hope? Mike “Meathead” Stivic, the character Rob Reiner played in Norman Lear’s breakthrough comedy, All in the Family, consistently countered his father-in-law’s ignorant, racist, misogynist, anti-Semitic rants with rational counter-arguments, but also with enough empathy that he could speculate about what might have shaped Archie Bunker into the bigot he became. Praise be to such enlightened comedy. Our current late-night comedians also comfort as they mock the inhumanity of Donald J. Trump and lament the corrosion of what on his last broadcast of the year Jimmy Kimmel, his voice husky with tears withheld, called Superman’s credo of truth, justice, and the American way. Indeed. I am, for the first time in my life, ashamed to be American. And of the many retorts to the President’s nauseating response to the Reiner family tragedy, Seth Myers’s was the most eloquent, a heartfelt tribute to a great-souled artist and an excoriation of the banal evil of Trump. Watch it if you haven’t.
So. There’s the double-edged sword of technology that can connect and comfort as well as stoke hatred and, at the least, baffle (as was the case with my recent computer cockup, leading to repeated conversations with a Dell technician in New Delhi who was rather less than deft with small talk as he waited for uploads (“And do you live alone or with a family? Do you have pets? Often people who live alone have pets”). Comedians reinforce our recognition of norms now exploded, and art can unite a room full of strangers experiencing together the pain of and consolation for unspeakable grief, as it did in the movie theatre where I watched Chloé Zhao’s extraordinary rendering of Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, so Shakespearean, as James Shapiro pointed out, in its evocation of the green world and the artistry necessary to re-work old material into compellingly relevant experience. Rob Reiner’s art endures, too: go watch Stand By Me again, or A Few Good Men.
Madbury Reservoir before the warm rain Does the longevity of art counterbalance all the losses of late? Getting old is famously not for sissies, and balance can be a literal and figurative casualty of aging. I’m certainly aware of diminishing capability, and trying to balance that recognition with a plan for action has me attending death cafés and finding inspiration in the Peacock series The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning. But there’s consolation, too, in understanding why we’re in the mess that we’re in. Anna Lembke, Professor and Director of Addiction Medicine at Stanford University’s School of Medicine, posits an explanation for a culture out of balance in her 2021 book, Dopamine Nation, and on successive episodes of the Hidden Brain podcast, “The Paradox of Pleasure” and “The Path to Enough.” Using her own embarrassing personal experience of addiction to raunchy romance novels, Lembke quite compellingly explains how our modern world of overconsumption (of drugs, food, shopping, media, etc.) leads to anxiety and unhappiness. Arguing that the relentless pursuit of pleasure, so easily accessible online, creates a dopamine deficit, our brains’ attempt to restore chemical homeostasis that ultimately spirals into anxiety and depression, Lembke proposes solutions to reset our reward pathways and restore a healthy balance of the brain chemistry attending our experience of pleasure and pain. She’s made me examine not only my own habits, but also suggested some insight into what drives our chronically over-indulged ruling class, especially a “leader” so wretchedly hollow that he can only find pleasure and self-worth in demeaning others. Of course he wants to shut down any person or medium capable of inspiring insight. Defund PBS! Mock the murdered Reiners! Censor anyone who fails to lavish praise! And make sure your name precedes that of a fallen president on the nation’s performing arts center. Pathetic.
I’m writing this on solstice eve: after tomorrow, the light begins to return. I’ve resolved to put into practice the methods of the Swedish death cleaners: discard what distracts and burdens. And I remain grateful for the many helpers in my life: my neighbor, who lifts the KitchenAid mixer too heavy for a recent hernia repair; the house painters who honored me as a favorite client by inviting me to their annual company dinner; my friend who every week shares an hour’s account of the ups and downs of negotiating this moment in our lives; my fellow book lovers who convene monthly to talk about how what we read illuminates our world and our place in it. So what if the mail brings mostly glossy booklets advertising expensive cruises, expensive retirement communities, and expensive hearing aids? It also brings Christmas cards with news and good wishes for the coming year. So what if a shopping quest for a simple cake plate leads to a queasy disgust at the amount of crap we are encouraged to buy? It also stiffens my resolve to cast off and lighten my load. And you, Dear Reader: you’re out there, too, receiving, considering, and, I hope, getting something out of this desultory philippic. Here’s to you.
And here’s to the light. As the carolers sing: Let nothing you dismay.
-
Savannah
5-8 November 2025
Lovely Madison Square, one of Savannah’s 22 squares, this one memorializing Sgt. William Jasper, who saved his regiment’s flag though mortally wounded in the Revolutionary War’s Siege of Savannah, 1779 Here on the last day of November, a month crowded with incident, I again pick up an account of my earlier travels south to Savannah, affording escape from a dark-by-4.30, so dreary and wet New Hampshire, while anticipating our first snow storm of the season coming soon.
Reader, we are transported back to Georgia on Guy Fawkes day, the fifth of November. Having driven my enormous rented Chrysler Pacifica (the “manager’s special”) back from Hilton Head to the Savannah airport (when only one person emerged from that beast, the Dollar agent was sore amazed: “Only ONE of you?”), I was Ubered to the Embassy Suites in downtown Savannah by Stanley, humorously dressed as Santa, and on arrival was favorably impressed both by the lobby and the attentive service, offering me a lovely corner room on the fifth floor with a fine view of the Eugene Talmadge Memorial Bridge spanning the Savannah River.
Uber Santa Stanley 
The Embassy Suites’ imposing lobby in downtown Savannah Brother-in-law Richard and nephew Daniel arrived soon after, and together we navigated our way to the Mercer-Williams House just in time for a tour of the place first made famous by the 1994 non-fiction novel by John Berendt, and then by the even more famous 1997 Clint Eastwood film, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, starring John Cusack, Kevin Spacey, and a very young Jude Law as well as several memorable actual Savannahians like the late, great Lady Chablis. The handsome Renaissance Revival house on Monterey Square was designed by New York architect John S. Norris for General Hugh Mercer, great grandfather of songwriter Johnny Mercer, its construction in 1860 interrupted by the Civil War, after which Mercer sold the unfinished structure to John Wilder, who completed it in 1868.
Richard and Daniel at the Mercer-Williams House When it was purchased in 1969 by antiques dealer and master preservationist Jim Williams, the house had been vacant and neglected for almost a decade. His painstaking restoration lasted two years, and was then grandly furnished with Williams’s private collection. Scandal and its representation in art, however, keeps the Mercer-Williams House such a popular tourist attraction, for Williams, thanks to a combination of cultivated hospitality and shoddy police work, notoriously got away with the murder of his gay lover, only to die in his handsome home less than a year after he was acquitted. Actor Kevin Spacey’s uncanny resemblance to Williams no doubt helps keep fascination with the Mercer-Williams house alive. The Williams family still own the property, maintained as a museum open to the public to benefit local historic and charitable organizations.
After an informative tour (but no interior photos allowed), we made our way back to our hotel to change for dinner, perhaps still under the spell of a more gracious era than our own.
Architect Hyman Wallace Witcover’s magnificent Scottish Rite Temple (1912-23) on Bull Street, now owned by SCAD and home to the Gryphon Tea Room Dressing for dinner, however, proved a thoroughly unnecessary gesture, as we were the sole guests at the 22 Square restaurant, where I nevertheless enjoyed my very tasty shrimp & grits and Daniel had his first gumbo mac & cheese. We noted the Peach Cobbler Factory on Barnard for future reference, as well as how very much the city was coming to life after 9 pm. Wearied by a day’s travel, we, however, retired to our suites.
The Eugene Talmadge Memorial Bridge (1991) seen from the Embassy Suites Next morning we met our Genteel & Bard guide, Julianna from Savannah, at the corner of Bull and Oglethorpe, for a most informative walking tour. Julianna knows her history, is an accomplished storyteller and Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) grad, and gave us a great 2-hour walkabout, finishing at the Basilica Cathedral of St. John the Baptist.
Julianna from Savannah 
The Moorish/Gothic/Classical façade of the Artillery Bar, built for the Georgia Hussars in 1897—Arabian architecture for Arabian horses?—home of the potent Artillery Punch 
The Green-Meldrim Mansion by architect John S. Norris (1850), and Sherman’s Savannah Headquarters. Did Southern Hospitality save Savannah and this Gothic Revival treasure from Atlanta’s fate? Perhaps. 
An inviting porch with haint painted ceiling on live oak-canopied Jones Street 
SCAD properties abound in Savannah 
The twin spires of the Cathedral Basilica of St. John, 1873 
After some excellent grilled cheese at Mirabelle Savannah, the little coffee shop across the street, we made our way north on Abercorn to the Owens-Thomas House and Slave Quarters, a Greek Revival beauty designed by 20-year-old English architect William Jay for Richard Richardson, built from 1816-19, and in 1825 honored with a visit from the Marquis de Lafayette.
The Owens-Thomas House, architect William Jay, 1816-19 
The porch from which Gen Lafayette spoke, 1825 
Owens-Thomas Garden Façade 
Slave quarters room in the carriage house 
Carriage House with Slave Quarters Our knowledgeable guide Jason confirmed the fun fact about porch ceiling paint Julianna had shared the day before: “haint blue” was a color that warded off ghosts and evil spirits, at least according to the Gullah, the once-enslaved African-Americans of the low country and sea islands of coastal South Carolina and northern Georgia. That belief came with practical value, however, as the paint’s mixture of lime, buttermilk, and indigo naturally created lye, a known insect repellent and deterrent salutary in a malarial climate. The house tour lived up to its reputation as both informative and evocative, and admission includes access to both the Telfair Academy and the Jepson Center.
Guide Jason explains how symmetry requires the blind window above him 
Owens-Thomas formal entrance . . . 
. . . and upstairs landing bridge After a day on foot, we opted for an Uber ride to the delightfully funky Treylor Park restaurant on Bay Street, followed by a stroll past City Hall and down (take the elevator between the Hyatt and City Hall) to River Street’s tourist shops and arcades for some ice cream, an encounter with Zoltan, and another Uber back to our Hilton home.
City Hall, Renaissance Revival by architect Hyman Wallace Witcover, 1904-05 
Zoltar prognosticates on River Street Our last full day together we drove along the causeway flanked by Spartina marsh grass to the Tybee Island Light Station and Museum for a (to me) challenging climb up the 178 steps to take in the view from the oldest and tallest (145 feet) lighthouse in Georgia, as well as a visit to the Head Keeper’s Cottage, built in 1881 and lovingly restored to the last lighthouse keeper George Jackson’s era, 1920-1940, with some of the family’s original belongings.
Tybee Lighthouse, 1773, rebuilt 1867 
Tybee’s 1st order Fresnel lens and light pattern 
The author “conquers” acrophobia 
Keeper’s Cottage with flag at half-staff for V.P. Dick Cheney Across the street in Fort Screven, a battery that was part of the U.S. Coastal Defense System until it was decommissioned in 1945, the kindly volunteer docent kept a record of all visitor’s home states, and gave us a good tip about where to have lunch: right next door at the North Beach Bar & Grill.
Happy Richard and Daniel enjoy the funk We giggled over Tybee Island’s reputation as the Redneck Riviera/Truck Stop-by-the Sea; monikers I think now rendered obsolete by gentrification.
That left us just enough time to drive back to Thunderbolt, Georgia for a guided tour of the storied Bonaventure Cemetery led by raconteur and historian Steven, a consummate performer and purveyor of dad jokes.
A tomb with a view 
The Mercer family plot Steven let us know that the Bird Girl once among the cemetery statuary had been so threatened by the fame attending its appearance in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil that she’s now housed in the Telfair Academy for safekeeping—with replicas available for sale in the gift shop.
A notorious murder monetized at the Telfair Once again pleasantly pooped after hours of walking, on returning to our hotel we decided to Uber to a dinner of some really excellent pizza at Vinnie Van Go Go’s (watch that pizza dough fly!), and then passed the time awaiting seats at the bar by cruising the lively City Market, home of Byrd’s Famous Cookies. We passed on the cookies, but enjoyed cobbler back on Barnard before returning to our home-away-from-home for one more night.
Queuing for pizza at Vinnie Van Go Go’s Richard and Daniel drove back to Safety Harbor the next morning after breakfast, and I took my time packing up for my afternoon flight back to Boston, routinely checking flight status until I learned of my original flight’s cancellation: the Federal shutdown took its toll. That proved a perk, however, as I was able to stow my luggage and stroll to the Jepson Center for a good long look around, including a close examination of highlights from the Glenn Close costume collection on display there: amazing artistry (and for such a tiny waist!).
A Close costume from Dangerous Liaisons 
. . . and the pannier under it 
More glamour for Glenn Close 
Rooftop sculpture at the Jepson Center 
Black Girl on Skateboard . . . (Vanessa German, 2022): my favorite piece on display What followed was less fun: another delayed-ultimately-cancelled flight out, a night spent at an airport hotel, an early flight the next morning and a l-o-n-g layover in Baltimore before arrival in Boston 28 hours after originally planned. ‘Twas a good, rich trip nonetheless. I’m already keen to return to Savannah.
But Madbury also has its charms—and charming visitors, too. This young fellow appeared just outside my kitchen window the day after Thanksgiving, and we locked eyes for so long I wondered at a possible visitation. Well, snow coming tomorrow. Time to settle in. Home sweet home.
Have we met before? 28 Nov 2025 Artillery Bar, Bonaventure Cemetery, Embassy Suites Savannah, Genteel and Bard tours, Green-Meldrim Mansion, Julianna from Savannah, Mercer-Williams House, Owen-Thomas House, savannah, Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), Scottish Rite Masonic Temple, Talmadge Bridge Savannah, Tybee Island Lighthouse -
Commonwealth Utopia
22 November 2025
Symphony Hall, Boston, 21 November 2025: Yo-Yo Ma implores our humanity Last night Yo-Yo Ma brought his Bach Project home to Boston for a sold-out Celebrity Series concert in Symphony Hall that was for the first time simulcast to over 20 venues across the Commonwealth. In a 19 November interview on Boston Public Radio, Ma, who has since 2018 toured six continents performing Bach’s Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello, explained that “there’s something special about this music”; he practices not to play perfectly, but “to serve a need that is somewhere out there.” Describing his Bach Project as a listening tour wherever he went to play, Ma asked who was using culture to strengthen the fabric of their community, and learned from the answers that there talented, intelligent, and kind people everywhere.
That message informed what amounted to an astonishing, moving, herculean performance. For nearly three hours without intermission and only a few remarks in between the first four suites, Ma played all six complex movements of all six complex suites, initially joking that we would know when we were approaching the end of each because all ended with a gigue, and then mouthing “gigue” as he began to play it. Even disregarding the skill, artistry, concentration, and a lifetime’s dedication required to perform such demanding works all from memory, the physical stamina demanded is gob smacking. The program itself made clear that because there would be no intermission, audience members were welcome to enter and exit the hall quietly as needed, and when after Suite 4 ended well past 10 o’clock with two more suites to go, and some people, however sheepishly, made their ways to the doors, Ma concurred: “I know it’s a LOT of cello, but it’s all I got!”
Of course it’s NOT all he’s got. The program was preceded by a video of Ma taking questions from people around the world, answering each with such animated delight, and, for example, demonstrating whale song on his cello, that I said to my friend Vicky, “He’d make a great grandpa.” Well, he IS one, four times over, and those grandchildren and the legacy our generation will leave them were clearly on his mind throughout the performance. Ma turned 70 on 7 October (I was delighted to note my proximate birthday on 8 October, though Ma is three years younger) and proudly declared his performance a birthday present to himself. Never losing sight of serving the community, he explained that the little cards we found in our programs were actions to be taken. Before playing Suite 2, which he described as fertile ground for imagination, Ma invited us to let our dream for our communities in 2050 come to us. That dream we were to record on the card (my modest one: a full-time librarian and affordable housing). Then, offering Suite 3, music for taking action, he instructed us to swap cards with a stranger in the audience, who should take it home and plant it: there are perennial seeds embedded in the paper. Let the dream take root and grow.
Introducing Suite 4, Ma explained that in writing his first three suites, Bach had set out to learn everything about what the cello could do. Having done that, in Suite 4, he discovered he could multiply the voices only four strings could play by having the audience’s memory and association, providing harmonies not actually played, perform as well as the musician. Then came the somber Suite 5, dedicated to all those who have lost something—health, love, purpose—but especially those who had lost their (emphasis on the word) dignity. Finally, with only the slightest pause, uninterrupted by applause, Ma proceeded through Suite 6, finishing that final gigue with a flourish that brought all to their feet, cheering.
No one at that point expected an encore, but after a second bow, suddenly stagehands were pushing a shiny Steinway D on to the stage, and Ma was telling us that as an old guy, he thought it very important to introduce young talent. That talent proved to be Boston Mayor Michelle Wu.
Yo-Yo Ma and Mayor Michelle Wu play Schumann, Symphony Hall, 21 Nov 2025
In the words of Lin-Manuel Miranda, “Immigrants! We get the job done!”The hall exploded with delight, and well into the third hour of performance, Ma and Wu performed Schumann’s Ave Maria. At the finale, more cheers and stamping. Wu congratulated Ma, who flashed several heart hands to the crowd, embraced Wu, and exited stage left.
For a time, we all shared Yo-Yo Ma’s passion and generosity. As we made our way through the scrum exiting onto Mass Ave well past 11 pm, I saw a young boy of perhaps 8 posing for his mom with a huge grin on his face in front of the Yo-Yo Ma poster twice his size. There, I thought, is our future.
Thank you, Yo-Yo Ma, for reminding us of our common humanity, and of what is possible if we share and act on our dreams.
-
Subscribe
Subscribed
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
Georgeann Murphy 