Going · North

Today, I successfully drove from our apartment in the peaceful Huron Village area of Cambridge into Boston for a doc appointment at New England Baptist Hospital, off Huntington Avenue, and then back home again at rush hour. !!! I even successfully negotiated the bizarre traffic lanes at the Fenway, where neither the the Riverway nor Brookline Avenue is allowed to turn left, and instead you have to swing right into an obscure little curving lane that funnels you back to the direction you would have gone if you HAD been allowed to turn left. 

Wouldn't you know? Just as I'm getting a little comfortable driving into Boston, I have to leave.  I even know (a lesson learned at 5:25 p.m. today) to avoid the rotary on the Cambridge side of the Boston University bridge at rush hour.  It was  like bumper cars.  Luckily for me, a nice man in a very large red van played offensive lineman for me, blocking the traffic behind him, so that I could exit the rotary onto Memorial Drive. Without his assistance, I'd still be going round and round the rotary, never able to get off, sort of like Charlie on the MTA.

Maybe tomorrow I'll tell you about sitting in the second row for the J.K. Rowling speech last Thursday. Headline: It was extremely cold.

It rained today. It reminded me, as so many damp spring days here have, that I fell in love with Cambridge when I saw the slate sidewalks on Brattle Street, dark and shining in the rain.
I didn't know it was love, and maybe the word is too powerful for as mundane thing as a sidewalk. But I knew, walking along Brattle Street in a spring drizzle, seeing how daffodils and crocuses made small  bright spots in the gardens' damp compost, so close I could have touched them, that this was a place I'd like to live someday.  The well-kept wooden houses, the Mansard roofs, the lilac hedges just leafing out and the closeness of everything enchanted me.
I've been enchanted by other, predictable places: Rome, Umbria, Paris. But I never lived there. Yet by now I've lived in Cambridge for more than nine months. Although it ends in two weeks, it's the first time in my 50-some years I've lived in a place I really wanted to live in, rather than a place where I had a job. 
I came here in 2006 for a three-day journalists' conference at the venerable Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, one of dozens of think-tanks that abound in Cambridge. It's housed in a dark red shingled old residence on Brattle Street next to the yellow Longfellow House. They put us up around the corner at the Sheraton Commander, which overlooks Cambridge Common, a personable and solid hotel tinged with a fading glory.  The conference had a cozy ambience: We were drawn from the relatively small community of journalists who find land planning, tax policy, property rights and similar arcane subjects interesting, and so it was an unusual pleasure to be among people with whom you could talk of those things and not feel as if they were thinking, "Serious dork."
I returned in late April 2007 for the next conference, and it felt like a reunion, both with the journalists and with Cambridge. By then I had already applied for my Nieman fellowship, a decision influenced perhaps more than was prudent by those slate sidewalks on Brattle, the wooden houses and the flower gardens within inches of the sidewalks.
Today, in the drizzle, I walked past rhododendron blooms arching over fences. I smelled the pungent wet compost of those well-tended gardens, and I was as much in love as ever.
For months I've bored my Charlotte friends telling how delicious the Cambridge tap water is, how the weather forecasts can actually be relied upon here, and how in Cambridge there are no weeds (well, no noxious Bermuda grass, pokeweed or out-of-control wisteria or wild grapevines). You can walk out the door and catch a bus or the T and hardly drive your car at all. But if you do drive, drivers here are calmer and nicer than in Charlotte, where they'll accelerate in order to keep you from changing lanes, and if they see pedestrians in a crosswalk they will speed up and try to kill  them.
I know Cambridge isn't perfect. Those picturesque brick and slate sidewalks are unforgivably slick in winter, especially as dusk falls and the damp sinks and glazes even spots that were clear an hour before. Parking is a nightmare. Housing is expensive, as are groceries, dry cleaning and just about everything.
But these days, as I say reluctant good-byes to friends scattering around the globe, and mourn the end of an interlude in which I had time to hear myself think, I know one of the things I'll miss most powerfully is Cambridge itself, its civilized flower beds, its well-kempt wooden houses and those sidewalks gray and glistening on a wet spring day.

SATURDAY, MARCH 1:  It's 9:15 a.m. and I'm watching nickel- and quarter-sized snowflake clumps sink to the ground outside our picture window.  I haven't yet gotten tired of the snow, although it's worth noting that we have no shoveling required unless we want to drive somewhere.  And today I'd like to go grocery-shopping, although I can always postpone until tomorrow.  We can walk across the street to Sarah's for emergency supplies or walk 10 minutes to Fresh Pond Market for a slightly larger store.

It's been a busy semester: January was filled with reading the 140 entries for the Goldsmith Awards, given for public service investigative journalism. Now, as the different newspapers win the various awards, I find I'm familiar with almost all the winning entries. Why -- WHY??? – didn't the Observer enter that contest?

When I wasn't reading contest entries I was making meat loaf for my Feb. 4 "sounding" -- a Nieman event at which each fellow provides dinner and gives a talk and slide show on his or her life.  Soon as the contest-reading ended I had to dive into teaching myself PowerPoint and how to scan photos in to my computer (no, I had not taken the time to learn that) and other fun things like making macaroni and cheese for 50 people.
 
Meanwhile, classes had begun and I was trying out about 10 classes in order to determine which to take. I've finally settled on 3 or 4, with 3 of them requiring much reading. They are:

Postwar British and American fiction, with James Wood, who led the literature seminar I took fall semester. This is a lecture class, so I'm skipping alternate Wednesdays, because meeting simultaneously on Wednesdays is:

Race and Society, a seminar with eminent sociologist William Julius Wilson, who studies inner-city neighborhoods.  We're reading a book a week for this one. Well, truth be told I'm reading about 2/3 of a book a week. But the readings are interesting, provocative and thought-inducing.  Wilson is not the most dynamic of seminar leaders, but he is among the best I've seen at taking seriously all the students' remarks, and thoughtfully assessing what people have to say, and generally treating all with respect, so that no one starts to feel as if his or her contributions aren't wanted.

Leadership: Mobilizing Group Resources.  This isn't as touchy-feely as it sounds. It's Dean Williams, an Australian, and it's at the Kennedy School of Government, so the 100-student class is a fascinating mix of people from all over the world. One student is a young man who tried to run for parliament in Bangladesh because he wants to help clean up his country's financial mess. Another is the daughter of Mahmoud Abbas of Palestine. Another is a middle-school teacher in DC.  And so on.  The point of the class is to teach us how to assess and interpret systems -- corporate, political, cultural, etc. -- in order to intervene and make effective changes. It's NOT about how to dominate a group or look good in meetings and that alpha-male stuff.

Racial Justice: a seminar with Charles Ogletree of the Law School.  My intent was to take either this or the Wilson class, but I liked them both, for different reasons.  Ogletree's seminar is large -- 30 or 40 students -- and I'm not doing the reading, although it's interesting stuff, or attending every week.  I simply ran out of time. He's quite good at asking provocative questions, such as "Does Race Matter? Should Race Matter?"  He's also tight with Barak Obama so there's a lot of political discussion, which is interesting.

Our Nieman dinners, seminars and "shop talks" are a mixed blessing. Some are quite intellectually engaging: David Gergen and Robert Putnam. Some aren't as interesting, or well-presented. But some that I go to out of duty end up being inspiring or enriching in completely unexpected ways.  Yesterday we heard from Sunday Dare (pronounced "DAH-ray"), a Nieman fellow in 2000 from Nigeria who risked his life repeatedly in order to publish a weekly newspaper during the years in which his country's dictator had outlawed most newspapers.  He hid in the jungle, his newsstand vendors were arrested and tortured, some of his colleagues were arrested, beaten, even murdered.  One colleague wasn't home when the soldiers came for him, so they shoved a gun at the head of his 7-year-old daughter demanding to know where her father was.  Still, he kept reporting and publishing, because he believed his country needed the information he was giving. 

And I realized: Journalism will survive.  It won't be the way it is now, because the Internet is destroying the current economic model for most daily newspapers.  But the thirst for information, and the thirst to present information, to one's community is powerful.  The courage and dedication shown by Sunday Dare and his colleagues drove that home to me.  Consumers and readers are demanding information.

The only question is how anyone will be able to afford to give it to them.

WEDNESDAY, JAN. 16: This week has been fun. A nice, gentle snow on Monday. Sorry, no snow photos here. I haven't gotten my new camera out of its box yet.

Saw Madeleine Albright on Monday night -- at a short talk, Q/A and book-signing session (I didn't get the book). Most interesting tidbit: She's lost weight by, among other things, working out and can now benchpress 400 pounds with her legs. Her remarks were pleasant but not particularly newsworthy. She's backing Hillary Clinton but wouldn't say bad things about any other candidates.

Saw ex-Boston University president John Silber at another book-signing talk last night (Tuesday), for his new book, "Architecture of the Absurd," all about the deplorable tendency among many star architects nowadays to design buildings that perform shoddily, because they're being hired by 501(c)3 groups (ie. nonprofit institutions, museums, etc.) instead of businesses that inspect the bottom line more scrupulously. He made great fun of Frank Gehry, but not in an anti-Modernist kind of way. He showed great appreciation for some other contemporary architecture, such as Calatrava. His talk was interesting -- and seemed to make pretty much all the points he makes in his book. Even had the same illustrations. So I didn't get the book. Others might enjoy it, however.

This morning I dipped into a class on the Law of Global Climate change to hear John Kerry speak, as a guest lecturer. (Bad cell phone photo is below. The odd halo effect is the lighting on his gray hair, not some cosmic comment.) I thought he was very impressive in terms of knowing what he was talking about, not needing notes, having a good grasp of the science, legislation and politics of the issue. And he didn't mispronounce a single word.

Nor did he come off as holier-than-thou, or stentorian. Why have we been tortured with Geo W for lo these many years? God is punishing America for something.

Here's a link to a NYTimes blog item about the Hillary Rally and her remarks on Iraq/Iran:
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/war-vote-dogs-clinton-again/

We spent a full day yesterday (Saturday) in NH: went to a diner to see Bill Richardson work the crowd, had lunch with some polital observers who described what it's like and who's doing well or poorly. Then went to a Clinton rally. And then home. We had rented a big bus for the trip.

The rally was in a middle school gym in Plaistow, NH, with banners all over the walls for their winning track and field, wrestling, basketball and cheerleading teams. There were a couple of guys from who knows where, dressed in a Santa suit and a snowman suit, standing outside with signs about global warming. During the Q/A session after her speech Hillary called on Santa: "You have to call on Santa," she said, to chuckles. He asked, not surprisingly, about global warming. And not surprisingly, she said the typical (tho welcome) things about working to solve the problem instead of pretending it didn't exist.

Clinton's speech was not one that got the crowd on its feet cheering and stomping. Her gestures seemed a bit practiced. I do think, however, that New Hampshire-ites (said to be "flinty") are not people who easily jump to their feet cheering, so maybe she didn't even try that stuff. Mostly she said things you'd expect. She wore a brown pants suit, the legs of which were just about a half-inch too long, and thus slightly wrinkled at the ankles, for the low-heeled pumps she wore.

I sat in the bleachers next to a woman who said she would probably vote for Mitt Romney, and her husband was a Republican, too, but she was there because her 13-year-old daughter, Aven -- who knows nothing really about the candidates -- came home from school Friday all excited because Hillary Clinton was going to be at her school. The 13-year-old really wanted to go, because she likes it that a woman is running for president, and got with some friends and they made posters. Aven's poster said "IDK ...BFF Hillary Clinton" -- it's test-messagespeak for "I Don't Know," and "Best Friend" and comes from some commercial that's on now. It didn't really make sense, mom said she told her. Aven was in the front row of a set of risers behind the podium filled with Hillary supporters, plus one of the Niemans from China who wanted to see what it was like. Hillary came in and shook hands with all the people on the risers, and Aven turned and looked up at her mom and pointed to her hand and beamed! The whole speech she kept turning and looking at her mom, with big eyes and an expression of "Wow! This is so cool!"

We had to leave before the rally ended. I asked Aven's mom what she thought. She said, "I've learned a lot." I don't know what that means.

Bill Richardson came through a diner in Tilton, NH, where we had positioned ourselves for breakfast. Also in the diner, in addition to our Nieman fellows who were, for journalists, awfully tame and low-key, were a couple of Harvard students working for campusvoices.com who were interviewing voters. And in came a TV-style camera with a big mike on a big stick, and they were interviewing people, too. They were from The Guardian, which has launched a US-focused Web site. In one booth, a corpulent man in a black Harley Davidson T-shirt and a gold cross on a chain around his neck leaned over to say to his companion (wife?), "Three more weeks." I think some of the locals are tired of all the campaigning.

All I can tell you about Richardson is that he's tall, wore a dark suit, a big wrinkled, had something of a hefty belly like that of an athlete who hasn't kept working out, looks more Latino in person than on TV, shook my hand and we made insignificant small talk. I didn't ask about issues. He is said to be everyone's second choice, i.e. veep material.

The diner didn't serve grits and their biscuits were not made in house. I didn't even ask about patty sausage. For sides with your eggs, you get a choice of home fries or BAKED BEANS. Now that's just weird.

SUNDAY DEC. 2: It took weeks -- almost three months, in fact -- to realize that in Cambridge a certain noise in my head is missing. I don't miss it.  It's like the buzz of a mosquito or a fly somewhere behind your ear or maybe a noisy fluorescent light, and it was a low-level but constant hum almost every day of my life in Charlotte for years: The knowledge that my neighborhood and city are being demolished, building by building for new construction.

Close to home, in our neighborhood, the demolitions and construction have meant 10 years -- TEN YEARS! -- of dodging construction trucks, listening to noise, streets so filthy I was forced to give up in-line skating, trees bulldozed, narrow streets made impassible by huge trucks delivering bricks, and so on. This has gone on for a full decade and there's no indication it will stop for the next 10 years, until every single house that was once there is gone.

It is real estate ethnic cleansing: The Hutus are the new behemoth houses up to 8,000 square feet. The Tutsis who are being hunted down and exterminated are the houses dating from the 1950s and 1960s that were, when we moved in 20 years ago, considerably nicer than most neighborhoods of that era in Charlotte. My neighborhood has been stolen from me by people who simply don't care that they have stolen it, because now they have huge houses. That angers me.

When you leave our neighborhood, the same thing is happening in many parts of Charlotte. Myers Park is no longer the neighborhood John Nolen designed. I think if anyone turned in the current situation to the National Register it would lose its national designation. The Coffee Cup soul food restaurant is being demolished, if it hasn't already gone (I haven't been there in three months).  The Athens Restaurant is gone. Tryon Street is virtually all new buildings. And this has been happening for years, building by building like a slow drip that carves away a boulder.

Seeing the great little shops that cluster at most key intersections in Cambridge in small, older buildings is a constant reminder of how Charlotte squandered that potential gold mine of retail activity.  When I think about it, which is less and less often these days, it, too, angers me.

Sure there's construction here. Cambridge and Harvard may even have as many scaffolds per square mile as Rome. And there are some tear-downs in some of the pricier residential areas. But it's not a relentless bulldozing of whole neighborhoods. Mostly, things that are here have been here for years. Businesses come and go, but the structures remain.  It makes me less fretful.  I like that.

Wednesday, Nov. 14: Turns out the husband of fellow Alicia Anstead, the cultural arts Nieman who lives in Maine, is a guy named Peter Davis who was the director for an Oscar-winning documentary in the 1970s, "Hearts and Minds,"  which was re-released in the last couple of years due to its relevanced for the Iraq war.

So we had a special showing for all the Niemans, with Peter answering questions afterward.

It's an immensely powerful movie. No narrator, just a series of scenes from Vietnam during the war, and interviews with people. One memorable interview is with Gen. William Westmoreland, who's wearing seersucker and standing someplace with live oaks dripping Spanish moss in the background and who says -- after a wrenching scene of a funeral in Vietnam where the victim's son sobs uncontrollably and the mother tries to throw herself into the grave -- that the Oriental people don't feel emotions the way Western people do.

Peter also has written several books and has won  some  Emmy awards, including one for "The Selling of the Pentagon" in the early 1970s.  And to meet him, you'd never think of him as "Oscar-winning director." He's very quiet, slightly built and wears very un-Hollywood tweedy clothes. He speaks very gently -- except when the Red Sox are losing.

So now we know an Oscar-winning moviemaker!  Alicia says if we visit their house in Maine we can have our picture taken with the Oscar AND the Emmys.  Whee!

I was relieved to learn that Charlotte voters didn't  scrap the half-cent sales tax that pays for the city's bus system and is building its rail transit system. Living in Cambridge reminds me daily why public transportation improves people's lives -- and of how important it is to start building a good system early, not  waiting until it's obvious you needed the mass transit 10 years earlier. By that point it's exponentially more expensive to buy the property needed, and the construction disruptions are hellish.

Interestingly, though Boston is large -- the city of Boston proper has about 590,000 people, less than Charlotte, but the urban area is about 1.7 million and Greater Boston is 4.4 million -- it's surprisingly compact. Things are closer than you'd think. For instance,  from the Lippman House in Cambridge to Fenway Park in Boston is only 4 miles. That's the distance from our house to the Observer building in downtown Charlotte. You can look at a map and think something will take an hour and find out it's only about 15 or 20 minutes.

Parking is scarce, because much of Cambridge and the older sections of Boston were built before cars came along needing so much pavement to rest upon. So walking or using the T (the subway) and buses is often the smartest way to go.

Obviously, this isn't universally true. There are several supermarkets within a mile or two of us here, and a Target on the far side of Cambridge, and they all have big parking lots. So does the Whole Foods in Fresh Pond Shopping Center -- a Whole Foods that is, if possible, even bigger than the Taj Ma-Teeter at SouthPark in Charlotte.

We live about a 15-minute walk from two T stops. We usually go to Harvard Square. Four bus routes go right in front of our apartment building, with buses every 10-30 minutes (depending on time of day, etc.). Overhead electric wires power the buses.

Most days Frank and I walk to our classes or events.  It's a 15- to 20-minute walk to most places. So I guess you could say our "daily commute" is 20 minutes each way -- about like my drive to work in Charlotte. We'll see whether cold, nasty winter weather forces us onto the buses.

Maggie takes a city bus to school, a "special" which stops right around the corner and goes straight to the high school on the other side of Harvard Yard.  High school students get half-price rides, using special student Charlie Cards, A Charlie Card is a preloaded plastic card that you can keep adding money to via machines in the T stations, which for most of us provide a slight per-ride discount. (For students it's a 50% discount.) The cards are named for the poor fellow in the Kingston Trio song -- "Oh he never returned, no he never returned, and his fate is still unlearned. He will ride forever 'neath the streets of Boston, the man who never returned."

In the afternoons Maggie either walks home (about a 25-minute walk) or walks to Harvard Square (10-minutes) and takes a bus. The lower grades have regular yellow school buses.

The subway is wonderfully efficient. At rush hour, it's clearly faster than buses. In October, during one of the playoff games, Frank and I and Stuart Watson decided we'd go hang out outside Fenway Park, just to absorb the atmosphere -- as we chose not to spend hundreds for a ticket. Stuart took the No. 1 bus from Harvard Square.  Frank and I took the T -- the Red Line from Harvard Square to Park Street, where we changed to the Green Line to Kenmore Square and then walked about five blocks to the ballpark. Yes, the Green Line cars were packed!   Even with having to change lines, we arrived 20-30 minutes before Stuart.

Traffic in Cambridge is calmer and slower than Charlotte, even at rush hour when the area around Harvard Square clogs rather badly. I think several factors are at  play. First, many people walk or bicycle or use the buses, Also, the streets are narrower than in newer cities, so you have natural traffic calming. Additionally, in most areas  there's a fine-grained grid system, although it has plenty of quirks, and as I noted earlier, suffers from an appalling lack of street signs. But that offers plenty of different routes to get places, so you don't always have to be on the same old arterial street.

Other than rush hour around Harvard Square -- which is always jammed with cars, buses and trucks and is a confusing tangle of one-way streets to nowhere -- the streets are almost sleepy. Even the dreaded Mass. Ave through Cambridge is devoid of cars for long stretches at off-peak hours. 

Crosswalks are plentiful, and the traffic STOPS FOR PEDESTRIANS!  It's still so miraculous to me that I sometimes walk out even if I don't have a green light, just to see the cars stop.  But with all the stopping for pedestrians and bicyclists, traffic never really gets about about 20-25 mph. 

Walking so much changes the texture of your day. It's much less stressful than driving. You have time to think. You notice houses and shrubbery and historic marker signs. Every day I walk past the former home of William Dean Howells, 19th century author and longtime editor of the Atlantic Monthly. And your feet and legs get stronger. I lost about 5 pounds the first three weeks I was here, almost certainly from all the walking. I already know that's one of the things I'm going to miss when I get back to Charlotte.

Long time since a post. My apologies to all. I've been having too much fun!
Apple picking at an orchard. Hearing Michael Sandel -- famous professor -- talk about justice. Staying up too late watching the World Series. Going to the Bosox parade Tuesday in downtown Boston. Discovering Filene's Basement: Imagine Marshall's and TJ Maxx, to the 10th power. Listening to Andrew Meldrum's dramatic life story that included video of him being shoved into a car by government goons in Zimbabwe, where he lived and reported for 20 years, and then disappearing for 12 hours while his wife, Dolores, didn't know where he was. ...

Our Australian fellow, Holly Williams, last night satisfied a long-held desire to go trick-or-treating. They don't do it in Australia, or in China where she's been working for 10 years, so she had never been. So a group of Niemans (some with kids, some foreign fellows who were curious, some foreign fellows who also had kids) went out last night. The Chinese guy actually went up to the door with some of the kids.  Holly (the Aussie) just stayed back and observed. 

Frank and I are both drinking from the firehose here. This morning went to a breakfast arranged by the former editor of the Miami Herald, Tom Fiedler -- who was one of the reporters involved in exposing Gary Hart, if you remember -- with a bunch of National Security Fellows and other military folks here to talk about why the press is so "negative" about national security issues. But they were all very polite and seemed generally to understand the role of the press.  No one came out and said anything mean.
 
Then at 1 had a class on politics and the new media, run by a former lawyer for the DNC, Carol Darr, who somehow knows David Erdman, and who is presenting a whole lot of fascinating, although troubling, info about the role that partisanship and uncivil blogosphere tactics are taking on politics, discourse and the operations of the news media.

Yesterday the Niemans had a lecture from famed poetry critic Helen Vendler, who was wonderfully down to earth and plainspoken. I may try to take a class from her next spring, in Emily Dickenson. And I'm just totally loving my seminar in "Consciousness in the Novel" with James Wood, who's now writing for the New Yorker.  We're deep into Henry James. Next comes Flaubert.

Tonight is a panel discussion at the Kennedy School on business news reporting with, among other people, Jane Bryant Quinn.

Friday, Sept. 14:

Our apartment is a bit problematic, we're learning.
We knew it had three bedrooms, but only one bed (plus a mattress on the floor in one room). We didn't know the one bed has no box springs, just a board.  My aging joints are NOT happy. Should we figure out how to take possession of the mattress and box spring we bought for Maggie's room? (Maggie, when you read this don't freak.) We didn't know it has no dressers or other chests of drawers in which to store clothes. We've become good customers of yard sales and the Goodwill store on Mass. Ave.

 Other issues are emerging. The refrigerator isn’t keeping food cold enough and is, according to the thermometer I bought, in the “danger zone.” I got suspicious because several times the ice cube trays seem not to have frozen even after about five or six hours and seem to have water on the bottom.

The stove has an oven problem: When you set the oven on 400 it only heats to 350. (I bought an oven thermometer in order to check.)  The toaster oven knob has broken off, so you can turn its little oven on but you can’t adjust the heat which I think is set on 450.
The dishwasher only gets dishes clean if the dishes are already spotless and free of any molecules of food. The clothes dryer is so weak we could get our clothes equally dry if we simply blew on them.  (That’s Frank’s line. I stole it.)

The landlady is incoherent on the phone due to a poor command of English and a heavy Indian accent, and her e-mails are only marginally better. The property manager she told us to deal with has just bowed out of the job.

On the other hand, we've had a series of fabulous fall-ish days, although they began with a rain on Tuesday that drenched those of us dumb enough to go out without raincoats and depend only on small umbrellas. But the plants all perked up and are now crisp and green and throbbing with happiness. Clear skies, temps in the mid-70s.

The trees are starting to change here. The air smells fresh. And last night I went to see "Figaro" put on by the Theatre de la Jeune Lune, out of Minneapolis. It's a weird-but-it-works production that combines Mozart's opera, "The Marriage of Figaro," with a Beaumarchais play, "the Marriage of Figaro," which I think predates the Mozart opera. Clearly, research is needed.  But it was funny, witty, well-sung (to my untrained ear) during the parts that were opera instead of speech. 

I discovered a lovely Italianesque interior courtyard at the Fogg art museum to which I intend to return. There's a room there with Bernini's clay models for things I've seen in Rome: The angels on the Bridge of Angels at the Castel Sant Angelo, a saint from the Altar of the Chair at St. Peter's, the guys in the gallery who are talking among themselves as St. Teresa experiences her Ecstasy, and -- only until the end of Sept. -- a model of the Moor in the fountain at Piazza Navona (not the Four Rivers Fountain but the one at the south end of the piazza).

I think it's going to be a good year. I  could, if I chose, just spend my days and evenings visiting art museums and plays, concerts and movies. Though as Nixon's henchmen used to whisper into the tape recorder at the end of their plotting sessions, "But it would be wrong."

Saturday, Sept. 8:
Seen on Garden Street, Thursday night, about 3 feet from where we were walking on the sidewalk:
A woman sitting in the driveway, combing the fur on a life-sized gorilla mask.
"That's something you don't see everyday," I commented  to her, as we passed.
Reply: "Hey, you're in Cambridge."

Cambridge appears to be the Sensible Shoes Capital of America. This, clearly, is fantastic.  My little Sensible Shoes sandals -- black with lots of stretchy straps to provide sturdy arch support -- are positively decadent here. Maggie reports having seen some not very sensible shoes at the high school last week. And maybe when the rest of the students all return during the coming week the SSQ (sensible shoes  quotient) will decline. I certainly hope not!

Q: How is Cambridge like  Charlotte?
A: Apparently you're just supposed to know where you're going, without any help from street signs.
In Charlotte, at least, you get street signs posted at the corners, although -- especially if you're in Myers Park -- they don't really help you much unless you have a map in hand.
In Cambridge, THEY DON'T EVEN POST STREET SIGNS!  You're driving along -- or walking -- and you come to what looks like a major intersection. You are even holding a map, because you're not stupid and you don't want to get lost. But try as you will, you can't find a single street sign to tell you what street you've just reached. This is common. Indeed, it's more common than it is to find a street sign. And typically, if there is a sign, it's hidden by a tree branch or something. You just have to operate on faith, sort of hoping you're doing the right thing.

I went to my first class on Thursday -- an art history survey course at MIT, I may audit it, although it conflicts with about 3 other courses I'm also interested in, including a seminar with the highly regarded Alex Krieger at the School of Design.  Hah-vahd doesn't seem to offer any general-interest art history survey courses.  Though I don't know about this MIT class. The prof is visiting from U.Conn., and he said Artemesia Gentilleschi (sp?) was a Renaissance painter (she was Baroque) and that she was "up there with Michelangelo and Leonardo" -- which  I'm pretty sure she wasn't. BUT I checked the textbook out of the Harvard Fine Arts library, thus saving the cost of buying a textbook, and it has lots of pictures of cool stuff I've already seen (St. Teresa in Ecstacy, etc.) and I'm inclined to keep going to class when I feel like it.

Here are a few of the courses I'm thinking of taking. Remember, I'm going to scrap roughly half of these:
Planning and Environmental Law (including Smart Growth)
Urban Politics and Planning
New Media and Democracy
Women and Leadership
Policy in Urban Settings
Studies of the Built North American Environment
Consciousness in the Novel (reading Austen, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Va. Woolfe, etc.)
Defining Urban Design
Fiction writing -- a special course for Niemans
Drawing -- a special course for Niemans
Yoga- special classes for Niemans.
I need the time turner that Hermione Granger used. (H.Potter: Prisoner of Azkaban.)

On Wednesday we (Frank Maggie, Stuart Watson and I) went to a free concert along the Charles River, at the Hatch Bandshell (home to the Boston Pops July 4 concerts for years) and heard Beethoven's 6th "Pastorale" symphony, Handel's Water Music, something called "The Birds by Respighi and a weird piece that replicated whale sounds.  It reminded me of the saying, "Always invite a Virgo to your picnic." We had no Virgos. If Susan or Jan had been involved, they would undoubtedly have remembered a blanket to sit on, and jackets because the evening was cool, and something more to drink than a couple of water bottles for 4 people.  Alas, we were rather pitiful picnickers.  But the music was inspiring nevertheless, as we watched the sunset over the Charles, and shivered, some of us with delight, others just with the chill.

Sunday, Sept. 2:
We had a reasonably busy first week: orientation sessions lasted from about 10 to 3 or 3:30 daily, with a couple of evening events — a cookout and cruise on the Charles River on Monday and a “New England clambake” on Thursday that wasn’t really a clambake, because no clams were baked. But it involved caterers serving clam chowder, steamed clams and lobster, so it wasn’t at all bad! Brenda suggested that we should make sure to let the melted butter run down our arms, and I'm embarrassed to say that I, for one, did.

We’ve had tours of, or spiels from, the School of Public Health, the Kennedy School of Govt, and the Harvard Business School. So I’m having a very hard time trying to figure out what courses I should REALLY take. Business school classes start Wednesday, and you get a few days to "course shop" but you have to be signed up by Thursday. Law school "course shopping" starts next week also. Other schools start later. So by end of Monday Frank and I need to have a pretty good idea of what we want to take.

I discovered a course in the Visual and Environmental Studies Dept (is that a weird name or what?) called "Loitering." You go stand where things happen and observe, and then do something. It's all very vague. Sounds kind of like being a journalist except you don't have to go back and write anything. I may just try to take it!

I spent about three hours one evening and got my bike all fixed up and ready to ride. Biking’s very easy here, as it’s mostly flat. We appear to live on the only hill in Cambridge, where the Harvard Observatory is perched. But even that isn’t a very hard hill. NOTHING like your hill. Wednesday we received our UPS boxes and simultaneously entertained the Comcast tech, who showed us how to keep our internet service from going out every time we switch from Frank’s laptop to my laptop. I shall again attempt to set up our wireless, but not until Monday night, so if it blows up our internet service we don’t have to go days without getting another tech out here on Tuesday.

Yesterday we all walked almost all the Freedom Trail, which is this walking tour through historic Boston taking you past the graves of Sam Adams, Paul Revere, John Winthrop, etc., as well as other historic places such as the building from which the patriots launched the Boston Tea Party, the site of the Boston Masscre (which is now -- get this -- a traffic island -- the oldest restaurant continuously in business in America (the Union Oyster House), and other fun stuff. We didn’t go all the way to the Bunker Hill Monument, which would have been another hour and we were dog-tired. Ate at an Italian restaurant, Antico Forno, in the Italian neighborhood, the North End, and then visited a 24-hour bakery. For real. Maggie got a cannoli. The North End in some ways is very like Rome. Tiny streets, clogged with cars, narrow sidewalks, everything open late, little shops, ga-zillion restaurants, and so on. It's short on Bernini fountains and Borromini churches, of course, but at least it has gelato. We'd had ice cream that afternoon, so postponed trying out the gelato.

Today we’re trying to unpack our stuff and put it away. Not at all fun, but necessary. I think we’ve ended up with some relatively empty kitchen cabinets, oddly enough.

Dear family and dear friends:

On Aug. 20 -- my birthday, as some of you know -- we packed the Camry and drove north. Maggie and I left Shoreham at 11:38 a.m. with a fully loaded car and bulleted up I-77, then I-81. Somewhere south of Staunton, Va., Maggie noted that the A/C wasn't putting out cold air anymore.  I was inclined to just keep driving. After all, I didn't even own a car with A/C until 1989, and I survived summers in Orlando, Fla., and Fayetteville, N.C., possibly the hottest towns in the continental U.S. with the exception of Columbia. 

But Maggie was going nuts, so we turned off at a truckstop at Steeles Tavern, Va., in search of a mechanic.  No luck at the truck stop, but a helpful DHL delivery man pointed us to a mechanic about a mile or two away. We drove down a lovely country byway -- Raphine Road -- past the McCormick Farm, owned by Va. Tech and somehow related to Cyrus McCormick and his reaper, and past the Va. Tech Sheep Research Center. For an instant I considered whether that was an omen telling me to launch my sheep farm fantasy there on in the Shenandoah Valley. I concluded it wasn't.

The mechanic turned out to be an auto parts store, so we got back on I-81 and the A/C had a miraculous recovery and worked the rest of the way.  I imagine we had just tired it out, driving a fully loaded car up mountains on a 98-degree day.

Spent the night at Chambersburg, Pa., very near Gettysburg battlefield but, of course, didn't visit it. Somewhere in Va., W.Va., or Md., we drove past a town that claimed to be the birthplace of James Buchanan. If that's all you have to brag about, you shouldn't brag. We drove past "Mason Dixon Rd." and then crossed into Pa.  Was it the real Mason-Dixon line, we wondered?

The next day, Aug. 21, was cold and rained virtually all day. What should have been a beautiful trip through mountains and rolling countryside was, instead, one in which trucks sprayed the windshield and clouds obscured every scenic lookout. We lunched in Milford, Pa.  The waitress had never heard of Gil Thorpe.

It stopped raining just as we crossed into Massachusetts. An omen! We found Cambridge and our apt. with no trouble. Arrived 7:45 p.m. (after starting out at 8:45 a.m.)

Since then we've cleaned the apt., thrown out junk left behind, shopped yard sales for dressers and chests of drawers, bought a cheap double bed and visited the Museum  of Fine Arts. The John Singer Sargent I particularly wanted to see had gone a a trip to Japan, but it's due back in Sept. And that cool New England weather? Forget that! It was 98 on Saturday and as humid as Charleston. Frank arrived Saturday and we took him to the trattoria around the corner where Maggie and I dined on Tuesday. They make their own gelato there -- we got mint. I think it may become a hangout.

But today it's sunny and in the 70s.  I'm in the first day of orientation as a Nieman, and it is only now sinking in that it's really for real.  I keep expecting some calamity to befall us and and snatch it all away. I confessed that to Dean Miller and he said he'd had the same fear! So maybe it is for real, after all.