There are Many Reasons to Love Cambridge, but the Best of All is Fall

Usually, I am NOT an autumn person.  Summer is where it's at for me.  Sun.  Warmth.  Blue skies.  T-shirts.  Beaches.  Gardens.  Upon hearing each of these words I am filled with a combination of glee and absolute comfort.  Fall typically affects me in the opposite way.  Instead of glee, I feel dread.  Instead of comfort, I feel out of sorts.  Despite my lament for the passing of summer, in Cambridge I am offered the solace of an autumnal rainbow of leaves quietly assuaging the pain of the impending wind-chills and icy precipitations of winter.  Even I can appreciate the beauty of autumn in a place like this.  The air is crisp and each step is filled with a soundtrack of crunching leaves.

These are a few pics I've taken this fall.  Please click on them to make them big, so you can really see:

Fall Leaf Bouquet made up of fallen leaves on my street.

Annual rowing event on the Charles River, just outside my door:

High School football practice in Athens, Pa.

Cherry and Green Apple Snow Cone.

My Mom's Street.

Suzanne, The City, and Tosca.

My sister-in-law Suzanne lives the kind of life that girls dream about.  She's young. She lives in NYC in a cozy loft neighboring central park with her two loyal and protective dogs. She has a fabulous collection of footwear, including a pair of candy red cowboy boots. She practices jujitsu. And she is a professional writer.  Yea, I know, wasn't that all of our plans when we were imagining life as a young adult. I really like Suzanne.  She's strong, opinionated, and elegant, but mostly just a lot of fun.  It had been my plan to go visit her for a while now, and the perfect opportunity presented itself when Charlotte and her mom invited me to an opera, Tosca, at the Metropolitan Opera as an early birthday present.

On Friday afternoon I jumped on a bus to NYC to meet up with Suzanne.  I only mention this mundane detail because on the bus I sat next to one of the most interesting people I have ever encountered.  He was an elderly man in his 70's or so, but with a much younger countenance.  He had penetrating eyes and was dressed much like an old school Ivy Leaguer, in his sweater over a collared shirt and a pair of khakis.  We started chatting and I found out he had a PhD from the Divinity School at Yale and after years and years had decided that he was a Zen Buddhist.  This Divinity School grad, turned investment banker, turned Buddhist who now lives in Greenwich Village chatted with me for nearly all of the 5 hour trip.  As the story of his life so far unfolded during our conversation, I came to realize that life is long.

So I arrived in NYC and met up with Suz and a handsome friend of hers.  We went for dinner, Ukranian, and then Suz and I went back to her place and talked through the night about life, love, and rock'n roll.  The next morning she made me some of the most delicious muffins I have ever eaten, lemon blueberry (I are three for breakfast), and then she took me an a walk through central park.  Do you know how huge central park is?  I had no idea. If you walk its perimeter its more than 6 miles around.  It's like a nature reserve in the middle of the concrete dessert of NYC.  I loved it.

I met up with Char, Dolores and Sister Carrington (a lady from my hometown who is 85 and made it a goal to see an opera at the Met before she kicks the bucket) for lunch and then to the Opera.  It was nice to hang out with Charlotte without her kids.  Let's be honest, kids and husbands are great, wonderful even, but they can get in the way.  The few hours I spent with Charlotte sans husbands and kids was like the good old days.

Tosca was a wonderful Opera.  The singers' voices were beautiful, not too warbley.  The staging was stark but realistic.  The story was dramatic and sad.  And of course, as in all tragedies, all the characters die in the end.  Tosca's death was the most traumatic as she jumped to her death for the top of a watch tower.  Just as you saw her throw her body out of the window of the tower the theater went pitch black and the curtain fell.  The audience gasped in unison at her death, but as the lights come back on and the curtain raised for our heroine to take her bow the audience erupted into applause.  It was really exhilarating.  What a wonderful birthday present..

Map of Manhattan and Central Park. 

 

 Suz's friendly puppy.

 

 Blueberry Muffins=perfect breakfast

 

Love.

 

 Central Park.

 

Largest collection of the endangered American Elm.

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Friends.

Googling my name:

I googled my name and up popped this blog post on RaceWire:

Racial Privilege on Full Display in NY Times’s “Why We Travel”

Click to enlarge.
by Ian Lovett
The New York Times Travel section’s most recent slide show, “Why We Travel,” adds 13 new slides and captions to last year’s slide show of the same name. Unfortunately, “Why We Travel” conveys the very worst of Western attitudes about travel, developing countries, and Otherness.

Of the 62 travelers featured, 57 hail from the United States, Canada, Australia, or Europe. And of the other five, three now live at least part-time in the U.S., while the remaining two are the only travelers shown on religious pilgrimage. The “We” of “Why We Travel,” then, refers to Westerners…and white people. 55 of those same 62 travelers are white.

One slide, in particular, epitomizes the show’s disinterest in people of color. It shows two white American women in a Tokyo metro station, separated by one seat from two Japanese men. “Amanda, 25, right,” the caption reads. Except she’s not on the right; the Japanese men are—she is second from the left, right only of her sister.

Such active blindness portrays travel as a privilege reserved for a specific class of people. The many shots of white vacationers luxuriating in developing countries with no locals in sight reinforces this interpretation. As does another telling slide, which depicts a white Australian man photographing a young Pakistani girl in a dress traditional, calling her a “sort of tribal people.” That is, Westerners partake, while people of developing countries are partaken of, just like the landscapes and architecture shown in other slides.

The even more insidious subtext of featuring white people almost exclusively in a show titled “Why We Travel” is that, “This is how and why We travel—They must travel differently.” Although a majority of the Taj Mahal’s visitors are, in fact, Indian, this slideshow profiles a young Danish woman’s trip to the famous tomb, while the only Indian traveler profiled is shown on a religious pilgrimage, not visiting the Taj.

All of which reinforces an idea of the Other that travel can, at its best upend.
Ian Lovett is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles.

Schrödinger’s Rapist: or a guy’s guide to approaching strange women without being maced

If you are interested in some great "girl power" reading please try this.  It's smart and funny.