Meeting Isabella

Today is the day!  Isabella Stewart Gardner, her museum and her eccentricities have always tickled my fancy – and today, I get to meet her!!  She built the three story Venetian palace that houses the collections; she scoured the Earth to find the art; she designed, displayed and arranged the pieces and when she died, she laid down the law – no changes. It is HER museum and I am finally going to see it. 

The brief museum bio highlights the adventuress rather than the Boston matron.  A strong and independent woman in the Belle Époque, she kept company with artists, musicians and writers – scandalous!  “Don’t spoil a good story by telling the truth", she said.  I can hardly wait!!

The sound you just heard was the shattering of my illusions.

Bold and eccentric gave way immediately to kitsch-y and bizarre.  For example, this Stylobate Lion was carved as the base of a column.  I just can’t imagine that it was this column.  Neither the styles nor the materials match.  I don’t think I would have cemented them together, but if I had, I hope I would have done a better job!  The museum is full of these strange juxtapositions; A Moorish arch frames an impressionist masterpiece and a collection of distressed enamelware in a hall lined with primitive Mexican tile.

As we wandered through the exhibits, we found bits and pieces of salvaged architectural details plastered awkwardly into the walls.  Paintings crowd haphazardly throughout the museum, paving entire galleries.  Indifferently lighted, they are clinging to the ceiling, propped in corners and hung behind doors.  Drawings and etchings are clustered on rows of hinged panels which are layered three or four deep on the wall.  So these wonderful sketches, some only a few inches square, hang far above my head and as I flip through, I feel like I am shopping for rugs at Home Depot. 

On our arrival, an enthusiastic and well-informed docent spent ten minutes trying to help us understand the genius behind the strange installations, but frankly, I just didn’t buy it.  Isabella bought Rembrandt, and Botticelli, and lots and lots of John Singer Sergeant.  But she couldn’t buy style. 

P.S. The courtyard was gorgeous!

(No cameras are allowed, so the pictures are from the website.

Snow Day

Weather reports for New England have been dire, and they tell us it is not over yet!  Fifty inches of snow in the last month!!  Parking lots look like ice houses and the pavement is cloudy white with salt.  Some of the icicles clinging to the eves behind my house were eight feet long…EIGHT FEET!  Tonight’s forecast is negative – literally – seven degrees below zero.  Twice now, the college has asked us to stay home to avoid the dangerous commute.  This is not what I am used to!

Some people have taken advantage of the time off to prepare for the beginning of school on the 24^tt .  Not me!!  I played hooky with a vengeance!  Santa brought me books for Christmas so I lounged on the couch in flannel jammies, lost in glorious fiction. 

The first time, we knew a day ahead, so I stayed up late and watched my first ever LIVE episode of the Daily Show – ignoring bedtime, secure in the knowledge that the alarm was NOT set.  I crawled into bed at midnight, wrapped myself in billowy down and fell asleep dreaming of snow fairies and lazy mornings.  Remarkably, sleeping in is so much more challenging when you are sharing the night with snow plows.  I am grateful to those guys – really – who must have been miserable out in the cold at 2 am – and at 4 am – and at 6.  Despite the vigilant attention of our nighttime caretakers, the cars in the parking lot looked like biscuits bobbing in a pan of white country gravy the next morning.  The patio was knee deep and the height of the walls and gate had been raised accordingly.   Twenty-four inches, baby!!

Friday, we woke early-early to the phone ringing downstairs.  Again, no school, so I crept back upstairs to relish my sleepy windfall.  All morning, cookie sized snowflakes drifted down like a cold version of Asteroids, gently but relentlessly covering the grimy leftovers from the last storm.  Neighbors bond in the Brotherhood of the Shovel…clearing not only their own cars and walks, but those of others while they are out.  The good news is that there is plenty of clearing to go around.  Let me take this moment to tell you how much I adore my husband, who swaddles himself in wooly layers to perform these rituals – leaving me inside, toasty and dry.

And today – it happened again.  School is closed, effectively scotching my trip to UMass Boston with my boss.  (Color me bereft!)  We are not surprised.  Children here have been wearing pj’s inside out, sleeping with spoons under their pillows and flushing ice cubes down the commode – all to buy us another day of winter vacation.  This time, the snow has stopped early, and the ever diligent plows are making progress, scraping and stacking huge mountains of ice.  By noon, we will be able to dig out the Yukon and go adventuring!! 

God I love snow days!!

Maxine

Our good friend taught her granddaughter that once the cookies are in the oven, you turn up the music on the radio and dance.

And they do!

So forever and forever, that child will remember her grandmother dancing in a toasty, sweet smelling kitchen, holding a dish towel.  Maybe she will even pass it on to HER grandchildren!

And I started thinking about my own grandmother, and what she left me.    She was a woman of her time: severe, practical, and not overly fond of children.  Baking, for her, was all business, and the results were never delightful, merely serviceable.  There were no tea parties at her house, no whispered secrets, no dancing in the kitchen waiting for cookies to bake.

She lived until I was in my 50’s, the matriarch of a disjoint and rambunctious family that little reflected the order she tried to impose upon us.  She wore pants long before it was seemly for ladies, and Chanel No. 5, which still evokes in me a sense of substance and security.

When she died, her daughters dug through boxes of memorabilia and stacks of ancient snapshots: long dead dogs and children gone agèd.  Maxine was there often, sharp, stern and forbidding.  But they also found one tiny and contrived strip of pictures as she mugged for the camera in some photo booth long ago, 1930?  Her hair was short and asymmetrical, with one long curve swinging out past her thin young face, a budding flapper?  The mischievous smile was definitely not status quo.  No other picture ever caught that smile. 

Hanging in her bedroom, was a print, delicate and vibrant, a saucy impressionist girl casually tossing her head and smiling broadly at an unseen admirer; completely incongruous in my grandparent’s spare, useful house.  And I wonder if somewhere in her soul, that girl and the flapper were both Maxine.  I hope so.

Jordans

Slowly, we are filling in the bits and pieces that will make the townhouse comfortable; pans, rugs, end tables…the list seems endless.  So early this month, we followed a tv ad for discount furniture to Reading – where Jordan’s advertises not only a huge warehouse, but a discount center as well.  Discount?  You know how cheap I am – so it was on!!  Now that was an experience!!

What looked like a mall, was the store itself – complete with Verizon, Boze, Jelly Belly and Fuddruckers – all inside!  Don and I went in looking for a couple of bedside tables and an entertainment center – and spent the better part of the afternoon.

While Don bought goodies at the ice cream shop, I picked out a table close to the dancing water – yep – like Bellagio. 

Seven big fountains and innumerable auxiliary nozzles and squirts sway and splash while Frank Sinatra croons in the background.  It is soooo pretty!  The show plays every ten minutes or so, whenever the trapeze school takes a break.

You heard me.

Students synchronize with a catcher and then swing out to connect sixty or seventy feet above the floor.  Once the catch is made, the victorious student lets go, lays back in space and free-falls into an airy, blue marshmallow-y thing.  For recreational participants, there are two hour lessons but for the serious folks, like those of you who have varsity letters in trapeze, there are walk-on performances of – well, whatever you can pull off. 

We didn’t buy any nightstands, but we did by Jellybellies.  And we are planning a trip in the very near future to one of their other convenient locations…I’m told the entertainment will be entirely different!!