Garden of Heroes

Donald Trump didn’t so much win the election for President as he did—from his point of view—acquire the United States of America for the Trump Organization.

Trump’s Supreme Court of the United States

He ensured that our laws only to serve his personal agenda by loading the Supreme Court with justices intent on pursuing a reactionary right-wing political agenda. He bullied the Republican party into lickspittle submission. He sees government property in the District of Columbia as his exclusive domain, and the ruin of its historic and symbolic structures as part of his revision of American history.

Trump’s Destruction of Historic Buildings

Trump Development

He is, after all, as he points out, “a developer.” “Developing properties is what I do,” he proclaims, as though developing our nation and its constitution into an instrument for personal aggrandizement and criminal enterprise is somehow fulfillment of his oath to “faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States” and “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”\

Trump’s Promises

That is not what he said he’d do as POTUS. He said he would reduce inflation, bring down the price of gasoline, secure our borders against “the worst of the worst,” end current conflicts and keep us out of wars in the future. Having persuaded a majority of voters to elect him—and abetted by the Electoral College—he has increased inflation through tariffs; increased the cost of gasoline by 50% in the last two months; set his Gestapo on decent, hardworking, law-abiding residents of our communities; initiated attacks around the world; and committed our treasure and military blood to Israel’s hostility toward the Iran and the Muslim Middle East.

Trump’s Throne Room

“What Are Those Gold Medallions Trump Keeps Adding to the Oval Office?”

How does he spend his presidential time? He encrusts the Oval Office with gilt in a vulgar effort to out-glitter Versailles. He brands American institutions with his own name. He razed the historic East Wing of the White House to erect his appalling “ballroom” and bunker. He destroyed the Rose Garden to install a dining area for his fast-food extravaganzas. He is converting Olmstead’s exquisite reflecting pool into a resort-style pool. He is breaking ground for a monument to his imperialist ambitions that will block the Voie Sacrée to Arlington National Cemetery.

Trump’s Brand

Trump’s Triumph and America’s Defeat

And now he wants a “sculpture garden” on some of the nation’s most precious ground, for “President Trump’s National Garden of American Heroes.” Trump really likes statues. I’m sure he will make sure that the “heroes” are of his own choosing. It would come as no surprise to me if he were to inaugurate such a collection with his own effigy in gold.

The Old Way of Democracy

I remember the complicated and contentious process of creating the Vietnam Veteran’s War Memorial, which was dedicated in 1982. I remember the arguments over the scale and placement of the World War II memorial opened in 2004. There was even a certain brouhaha over the FDR memorial in 1997. Voices were raised and voices were heard. Not everyone was satisfied with all the results, but congressional oversight and the rule of law prevailed.

This will never be the case in Trump’s MAGAmerica where his word and whim are law, and his taste for the grandiose, gargantuan, and grotesque is insatiable.

The Rose Garden: then and now

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Improve Research Before Booking

Santa Justa Lift aka Eiffel’s Tower is closed

It could have derailed my plans: the most significant art and cultural institutions in Lisbon are closed for repairs, upgrades and expansions from 2025 through 2026. Both state and private art museums, and historic sites. Oh, and the funicular isn’t running for the time being, either.

street lamp and my window

Then there is the matter of choosing a hotel. I am included to frugality and directionally challenged, so assessing location is a huge challenge in an unfamiliar place. Word to the wise: it’s a bad idea to guarantee the room on Booking.com (otherwise quite a useful site) to get a discount. Just don’t. There are a hundred and one reasons why plans might change and the investment is a total loss.

On a related topic, read every confirmation email carefully, top to bottom: for airfare, taxis, and hotels. You never know when there will be a vital bit of information—such as a six-digit security-pad number that must be followed by the pound sign in order to get into the building. Just sayin.’

Improve Research before Day Trips

Pena Castle from below

Day trips require every bit as much investigation as the primary focus of the vacation. Just find the right train and get on it, right? Maybe not.

a room for the public at Sintra

The pages for Sintra in the DK Lisbon guide referred to “parks,” “quiet walks,” and “buses.” Those things exist, but the terrain outside of the town center could intimidate experienced trekkers. The buses are on-and-off jitneys and they only transport to palaces and historic houses other than a car. Then there is the problem of timed entries.

Beware of personal limitations. Forgoing the tour, I barely made it up the hill to Pena Castle see that gaudy exterior; downhill wasn’t much easier. Fortunately, I could explore Sintra at a snail’s pace. Not a chance I could have added the Moorish Castle to that itinerary.

I did, however, exceed 12,000 steps that day.

Do More Hanging in the Hood

Not every location invites sitting and strolling but Baixa does. Kids and older folk. Gangs of young people. People with their dogs.

Arco da Rua Augusta and Praça do Comércio

Baixa, rebuilt on a modern grid after the earthquake of 1755, occupies a narrow plain on the bank of the River Tagus, The area is a sort of valley between the hills of Chiado and the northwest, and the precipitous slopes of Alfamas to the east. These days, it’s also unfortunately prone to floods. But to amble beneath the Arco da Rua Augusta into the Praça do Comércio and the bank of the Tagus—especially in the gray and silent mist in the early morning or the golden light and bustling activity of the afternoon? Sigh.

Bubbles

My local was Imprensa, an oyster bar at the eastern end of Rua de São Nicolau. The bartender chose a lovely Portuguese white—Golpe Douro Meda—to go with my fresh local oysters; I came back for a glass of tawny port on my last night in town. She selected that one, too.

I found ice cream, too! The pedestrian precincts of São Nicolau are home to La Romana dal 1947. As frozen dairy in any form is an essential food group, I was there most every evening. If the website is to be believed, there are 91 stores spread across Europe and the Near East. Three in Abu Dhabi and nine in Bucharest. Astonishing, impressive, and slightly weird.

Take Public Transportation

Nothing improves travel and protects the pocketbook like excellence in public transportation. Lisbon’s is as good as any I have ever used.

The Navigante card is rather like the Charlie Card back in Boston and gets you considerably farther. “Zap” that bit of yellow pasteboard with a few euros and head wherever you want by Metro, bus, tram, a few railways, and the ferry. “Swipe in and swipe out.”

Breaking with the News

I’m a news junkie. I jones for politics. Travel can imposed sobriety. My room had a “television” that was essentially a wall-mounted monitor on which—if I knew how—I could log into my streaming services. It stayed off. Nor did I see a news stand anywhere I might buy an International New York Times, known prior to 2013 as the International Herald Tribune.

Once home, I plunged back into the muck and mire. Breaking news: nothing significant had changed and the president is unfortunately still alive and creating chaos.

In the Future

pasteis de nata and cappuccino

I’d like to go back to Lisbon, perhaps, though, not until 2027 when I am confident most museums will be open. Maybe a trip in slightly warmer weather would be better—September-October or April-May rather than January. At least five full days instead of four.

Next time I vow not to leave hand-luggage behind at the baggage carousel. Next time I will know how to get into Sapateiros 44 and I will bask in the glow of familiarity. And eat more pastéis de nata.

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Sé – the nave from above

A slow stroll across Praça do Comércio, a breath of damp air off the River Tagus, a coffee and a croissant were prelude to the ascent. I climbed first to the Romanesque gloom of Sé and its jewel-box neighbor, Santo António da Sé, then descended to the Museu do Fado where comfortable chairs and recordings of Fado songs eased my joints and touched my soul.

Panteão Nacional

street in Alfamas

The church of Santa Engrácia, better known as the Panteão Nacional, seemed nearby. Google Maps now tells me it’s 550 meters and about ten minutes distant, with a rise of 35 meters. If I did the math correctly—and I wouldn’t rely on that—the slope of that walk is about 65 degrees. My route involved several detours and lasted a bit more than ten minutes. That calculated uphill of 65 degrees? That’s what it felt like.

Santa Engrácia

Panteão Nacional

Now a monument to political, military, and cultural heroes, the church was enjoined around 1568 by the Infanta Maria of Portugal, daughter of King Manuel I. “Manueline” remains a description of that era and its architecture.

Construction did not go smoothly. A storm took most of the rising church down in 1681. A new architect, João Antunes, took over, creating a different, classicizing design based on the Greek Cross. When Antunes died in 1712, King João V focused his attention and funding elsewhere. Work slowed. The building, complete up to the royal cornice, withstood the massive earthquake of 1755 and a couple of years later was closed up with a wooden roof.

Other Uses

For a while, the project remained under the purview of the Franciscans. With the dissolution of the monasteries in 1834, the Ministry of War took over the unfinished church and ceded it to the Directorate-General of Artillery, who used it as a warehouse for scrap metal and foundry items. For a while it was an arsenal. During World War I it was dedicated to the manufacture of footwear for the Portuguese army,

In 1916, the Church of Santa Engrácia was designated by law the “National Pantheon.” The present dome was added during the Estado Novo of dictator António de Oliveira Salazar and the edifice completed only in 1966. Such luminaries as presidents, writers, fado singer Amália Rodrigues and footballer Eusébio are entombed there. Cenotaphs remember explorers like Prince Henry the Navigator (1394-1460) and Vasco da Gama (d. 1524).

Obras de Santa Engrácia

up into the dome

A new idiom emerged during the nearly 400 years that the church remained a building site. Obras de Santa Engrácia (works of Saint Engratia) became a byword for an endless construction project But why?

Could it be that the church was cursed?

It is said that in the mid-17^th century, while Santa Engrácia was still incomplete, a young man named Simão Pires de Solis—a “new Christian”—fell in love with an aristocratic girl, Violante, whose noble papá was having none of it. The gentleman parked his daughter in the adjacent convent of Santa Clara; the besotted Simão nonetheless managed to meet her on the sly and they contrived to elope. Unfortunately, the same night they ran away, the reliquary of Santa Engrácia disappeared from the church.

Who had desecrated these religious precincts?

The Curse

Their love was not to be consummated and Simão was immolated.

looking back

Such regular trysts had not passed unnoticed and our lovesick swain was arrested by the king’s men and accused of stealing from the church. To protect his beloved, Simão kept secret his reason for lurking about the Convent the night before. He was quickly sentenced to be burned at the stake.

There seem to have been Jews in young Simão’s ancestral tree; the Inquisition was still very much a thing in that intensely Catholic country. It was established in 1536 and would not end until 1821. Simão protested his innocence, but to no avail. It is said that as the flames engulfed him, his screams doomed the church to perpetual unrealization.

And that, indeed, was nearly the case.

It is also said that years later, a dying man summoned Violante, by then a novitiate at the same Convent, to confess that he himself had stolen the relics and framed Simão for the crime. Tradition holds that Violante forgave him.

To the Dome and Beyond

view to the Tagus

181 steps take visitors from the ground level of the Pantheon past two levels with walkways around the drum that supports the dome with its cupola. The view down to the floor is vertiginous. The elevation of the site and the height of the building allows an unobstructed, 360-degree view of Lisbon from the broad roof terrace.

But I had greater heights to achieve. It was Tuesday and thus the Feira da Ladra, the “Thieves Market,” was open in the Campo da Santa Clara further uphill. It was a while since I had strolled a good flea market. And home, Rua dos Sapateiros 44 was all downhill from there.

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pequeno-almoço

My research on Sintra was inadequate.

I knew the train ran from Rossio and that my navigante occasional card would zap me there. I would find a stellar collection of historic sites and walking trails to explore. Buses run from the center of Sintra to distant palaces. But the geography? And distances?

Yeah. Bombed on that homework assignment

The Depot

Rossio station

Walked past Rossio train station after my pequeno-almoço of gooey, fresh-from-the-oven pastéis de nata, and a cappuccino, at Castro on Rua Aurea. I had noticed the Art Nouveau flavored façade of the station, just didn’t recognize it as portal to transportation. Turned around when I realized I’d wandered beyond 1̊   de Dezembro up Avenida da República.

I love trains. I love all forms of public transportation. Lisbon makes getting about convenient and inexpensive that way. The forty-five minute ride to Sintra cost something like $2.35.

Orientation

model of the palace

As I dodged the horde flogging brochures and tours to us day-trippers, I wondered where exactly the Palácio Nacional de Sintra was. GPS claimed it was a seventeen-minute walk. Deciding to conserve my strength, I popped €13.50 for the “Hop-on Hop-off” bus that went to “all palaces and castles.”

Should have taken the time to read the map. Of course, it wasn’t really a map, just a diagram, a couple of circles with drawings of the palaces on the tours. Nor did I sort out what direction the buses starting their tours were headed. If I had, I would have taken the Green Line 435 not the Yellow Line 434. Green 435 would have started in the historic center of Sintra at the National Palace. Yellow 434 went the opposite direction and followed a terrifying route of hairpin turns and scant side clearance before arriving at the Moorish Castle, the first stop.

Palácio Nacional de Pena

the palace at Pena

Pena seemed interesting. It’s quite the gaudy residence, but a tour of the interior must be guided and requires a timed ticket. The next available ticket was about three hours off.

lion’s head

I could explore the gardens, I thought. Maybe take a look from the outside. Yeah. “Gardens.” Should’ve focused on the comment in the DK book that said, “On the highest peak of the Serra de Sintra stands…”

Started trudging upward and quickly got winded. Paused. Breathed. Kept going. Then there were steps to the building. How the heck did those aristocrats make it up without a good pair of sneakers?

Didn’t encounter a ticket-taker until several levels up the walkway. After a brief visit to the toilet and a glance around the shop, I started down. Cautiously. Very cautiously. I was relieved when the driver of the Hop-on Hop-off announced that the next stop was the Sintra palace.

Palácio Nacional de Sintra

twin chimneys

The historic center of the town has a certain charm and the Palace, formerly the heart and muscle of the Portuguese kingdom, sprawls magnificently midmost. A pair of kitchen chimneys, twin phalluses, are visible from just about anywhere and now constitute the logo of the town.

Sintra

The interpretive approach is to address the building thematically rather than only chronologically. Colorful panels address topics like Power, History, Religion, Women, and Kitchen. In addition to well-crafted labels, there are wonderful videos in which actors cosplay various historical and imagined characters, offering a brief and entrancing suggestion of what a such a life might have been like.

Background

magpie ceiling

The edifice was raised on Moorish foundations. The oldest rooms date to the 13^th century, and most to the 16^th and 17^th century, with parts rebuilt after the earthquake of 1755. The structure was much remodeled with the shift to a constitutional monarchy in 1822 and underwent some dubious “restoration” in the 20^th century during the Estado Novo  or “New State.”

Portuguese pottery

I faintly remembered that Portugal was an authoritarian state during my youth. António de Oliveira Salazar (1889-1930) envisioned Portugal as a corporate structure headed by himself as Dictator. Sounds like someone Donald Trump would have admired. The Estado Novo ended with the “Carnation Revolution,” a military coup that restored constitutional democracy. In fact, there was a presidential election in Portugal while I was there. No one received more than 50% of the votes cast, so next month there will be a run-off between a Trumpian Rightist and a fairly traditional liberal inclined toward Socialist policies.

Back to Home Base

I made it. The room was a bit cold. Doesn’t tend to warm up until about six hours after the heater has been ratcheted up. My feet and knees testified to the day’s exertions and my Fitbit claimed I logged 12,103 steps. Early to bed.

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Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian

The CAM

Two structures nestle in the embrace of a landscape of trees and shrubs, walkways and waterways, groves and glades. Benches invite moments of solitude and the intimacy of conversation. CAM (Centro Arte Moderna) is a swooping building with soaring ceilings easily reconfigured to accommodate changing installations. The museum, library, performance and administrative areas spread out in a building across the campus.

Complexo Brasil

In the Garden

The museum is closed until July 2026 for improvements and expansion. In the meantime, temporary exhibitions fill a spacious gallery. “Complex Brazil,” as curators José Miguel Wisnik, Milena Britto and Guilherme Wisnik write,

…Brazil (which is made up of many Brazils) is the complex result of colonial actions of great proportions and consequences in which Portugal dragged parts of Africa to America and took this immense indigenous land for itself. What has been termed ‘discovery’ was an act of force that conceals this traumatic origin. The exhibition aims to reveal the concealment of these Brazils and to offer the Portuguese and Brazilians, from a position of shared responsibility, the prospect of a reciprocal revealing…

We embrace the country as a powerful racial and cultural mosaic: a complex mix of biomes, ethnicities, cultures, times, logic, languages, religions and economic processes. We affirm one of Brazil’s strengths: the power of inclusion, that is, of a relationship with the world in which nothing is excluded… We stress the aesthetic and political revival of indigenous and black creators and thinkers. At the same time, and for this very reason, we bring to light the structural realities that have made the country unequal and violent.

Parallels and Resonances

One video illustrated the duration and intensity of the African slave trade by nation. (The Portuguese had long made a practice of enslaving Indigenous peoples from their arrival in 1500.) Africans were trafficked to Brazil from 1540; Brazil achieved independence from Portugal in 1822 and ended slavery in 1888, the last nation in the western hemisphere to do so.

Complexo Brasil

Freedom did not bring with it economic opportunity or social acceptance. As one panel points out, enslaved peoples simply stopped being enslaved; the racism and economic oppression that had imprisoned them remained systemic. More than three hundred years of tyranny and subjugation built walls that remain intact.

Gold, gemstones, fine woods, sugar, cotton, tobacco and other goods produced in and imported from Brazil—thanks to its enslaved masses—made Portugal the richest nation in the world in the 16^th and 17^th centuries. In the United States, slave labor created immense generational wealth for white people in the South. The white, Portuguese government of Brazil shut out the descendants of Indigenes and African slaves, consigning them to poverty and social disorder. The policies of Jim Crow in the United States did the same.

Art as Witness

If “Complexo Brasil” were only a survey of three hundred years of art connected to indigenous and African peoples of that nation it would have been a marvelous show. In connecting visitors to the history, cruelty, and racism that shaped it, the exhibition is a document about who we—Indigenes, former slaves, descendants of invaders and colonial powers—are in the present. It tells us, moreover, why we need to know and understand who we are and how we became so.

In recognizing how complex Brazil is, I see my own country, the moral disorder of my government, and the righteous anger of so many citizens in a brighter light with sharper detail. I also know, for certain, that my government, the Trump Administration, would never ever allow such an exhibition or its organizers to evade severest punishment.

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Humberto Delgado Airport

A little over six hours after take-off we disembarked and started the trek to passport control; the officers there didn’t seem much pleased to see us. Another hike and we arrived at the baggage area, where Carousel 13 was the most distant. Boston luggage was slow arriving and I worried that I was running late. Douglas, my driver, might be gone. Tick-tock, tick-tock.

Anxiety is distracting. Traveling solo means there’s no designated supervisor of possessions. When my suitcase was disgorged onto the conveyor belt, I leapt to grab it and was off through Customs to Arrivals.

Found Douglas—he totally looks like a Douglas, young and handsome—and panic! I had left my computer case with the brand-spanking-new tablet and all my carefully organized notes, my cords and plugs, books and Kindle, on the bench where I had been sitting.

Panic

Douglas hung in with me as my agitation spiraled. No one seemed concerned, only adamant that I could not, under any circumstances, go back into the luggage area to search around carousel 13.

“Go to the Polícia,” someone finally said. The Polícia weren’t particularly helpful. A young officer suggested I was being discourteous and demanding in my moment of need. I groveled my apologies, and they agreed—grudgingly—to take a look. I sent Douglas on his way and waited for the longest twenty minutes of my life. They found the bag and dispatched me to Customs to retrieve it.

Back to Customs

But I couldn’t get back to Customs? I went up escalators, down stairs, and all around. But you can’t just walk back up the ramp that arriving passengers use to get out of Customs into Arrivals. If I could have done that, trust me, I already would have.

Finally I waylaid an officer headed that way and he sweetly—if slightly suspiciously—escorted me to the security station. There it was, my black computer bag in all its nondescript glory. I itemized the contents for them and showed my passport. Everything was there. Everything.

Hotel Bound

Travessa da Portuguesa

I was hot, I was sweaty, and I was slightly nauseous. The cab that took me to Palácio das Especiarias at Rua Horta Seca 11, where I was to leave my suitcase until 3:00 pm, cost €34 plus tip.

When I asked where to eat, Ana at Reception suggested Farmacia Felicidade, which turns out to be attached to the Museum of Pharmacy. And it all seemed closed. That after a vertiginous walk up hill, down steps, and up steps. Then my mobile died.

Ordered a bowl of chicken soup and an espresso at Leitaria Pastelaria Orion (“desde 1945”) on the corner. Tried to remember just how I had gotten there and hoped I’d be able to make my way back to Rua Horta Seca.

Seeking Shelter

view from the desk

Thank heavens for printed maps. At the Palácio,  dear Willian (William? Will?) ushered me to the well-appointed public areas on the elegant first floor and said to help myself to tea and coffee. Did some writing. Snooped around in the drawer of the desk. Wondered just how expensive such splendor might be. For my next visit, you understand.

Sapateiros 44

My final destination was Sapateiros 44 and getting from Chiodo to Baixa meant dragging a heavy suitcase up hills and down, over damp cobbles, my strength ebbing quickly. I did get there, though. Huzzah!

No. Bummah! I had checked in at Especiarias as required. I had a copy of an email that included the pin number sent. Nothing worked. Doors remained locked. There was no option but to get myself and that deadweight of a bag back to the hotel and solve the problem.

Misdirection

I am directionally challenged at the best of times so of course I got lost, ending up somewhere very far from where I wanted to go. Rain was beginning to fall rather more heavily. Taxi!

Back at Especiarias, they assured me an email (which one?) had included the six-digit code followed by a hash sign. I needed the code for identification; the hash sign actually unlocked the door. Bad words were crowding into my mind.

Another taxi—damn, but I was wasting money on taxis—and I returned to Sapateiros 44. I entered the code and hash sign and was greeted by a welcoming buzzing and click. A housekeeper helped me enter the same code at the door of room 3.

Bem-vindo a Lisboa

my window from Rua de São Nicolau

Made it! I had wasted the first half day, but whatever.

I consulted Google about restaurants in easy walking distance. Imprensa at Rua de São Nicolau 24 offered fresh local oysters and recommended a glass of Golpe, a white from Douro Meda. It was the repast I needed, the perfect libation, all in the bar of my dreams. Dark. A bit dingy. Incredibly friendly.

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The Annual Greeting

I was gonna be granny of the groom! Miles and Holly were to wed on September 6, and I had been holding the date since forever. The couple’s color palette was green with a touch of orange and dress code was “floral formal.” I started shopping. When I couldn’t decide between two lovely dresses, I bought both. A gorgeous, hand-painted scarf found on Etsy came all the way from Romania. Fantastic footwear, too: pale pink Keds, styled like Mary Janes, with crystals on the toes. I reserved my room at the wedding venue, booked airfare, rented a car. Ping was set for doggie sleep-away.

It was all systems go until it wasn’t. August 24 I was feeling pretty crappy, and my cousin Helen texted me that there was Covid in the nursing facility where she and I had been visiting her father. My test was positive. Cancel the hair appointment and kennel. Cancel travel plans. Cancel it all.

The “I do’s” were vowed without me and I was crushed to miss them. Now I need somewhere to wear my dresses and sparkling shoes.

Loss Happens

This year as in the past, joys are the silver lining of sorrows.

our front door from the hallway

My brother Jim died May 2 from a stroke at the age of 69. Many of you know that Jim had separated himself from various of his friends and family—myself among them. The gathering, however, was a chance to reconnect with wonderful people, many of whom I hadn’t seen since the 1970s. His sons hosted us at a church in Ashfield, Massachusetts, the town he once called home. Songs and remembrances celebrated that often inexplicable—and always loved—man.

Which brings me back to Helen’s father. Ping and I spent Christmas 2024 with that family and it was a hoot. 2025 had barely begun, though, when David called me from a hospital. He had thyroid cancer. The prognosis was grim and the next eight months was a rollercoaster of hope and discouragement. His Helen, her brother Calvin, and David’s partner, Theresa, were utterly magnificent caretakers. I pitched in when I could, spending a few days at his home to administer meds, chauffeuring Helen to Cape Cod and various facilities. And, yes, he contracted Covid as well. His battle was determined. We lost him, however, on September 11, at 70.

Old Friends and Family Doings

Before all that, in April, I had driven down to Maryland for a celebration of the life of the great writer, and my Dan’s best friend, John Barth (1930-2024). It was a fine literary morning. I swapped stories with a couple of Jack’s kids and encountered people Dan and I only ever seemed to run into at Johns Hopkins’ events. The trip included time with my Tattooed Boy and his girlfriend, artist-friends; a meal with a tall beauty at Lithuanian Hall; and a days-long hang a hostess with the mostest.

our front door from inside

My Tattooed Boy, by the way, is now the owner a a beautiful townhome. Huzzah! He’ll be hosting Christmas this year.

Later in April it was off to at Emma Willard School in Troy, New York, to celebrate the opening of the Alice Dodge Wallace Center for the Performing Arts. Students were thrilled that our esteemed alumna Jane Fonda ’55 addressed the gathering and carved out time for them. Accommodations were provided by ALSC then, and again in October for  the installation of the new Head of School, Dr. Karen Lassey. Campus is a happening place!

In August, ALSC came East for a few days of tourism and one or two gin-and-tonics. We checked out the Vincent van Gogh exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, sailed the harbor from Piers Park here in Eastie, and drove north into the wilds of Ipswich to tour elegant Castle Hill. Then it was the Boston Tea Party museum—both entertaining and educational—and the Mapparium at the Christian Science Mother Church. Hadn’t been there since about 1972. Installed in 1935, it’s an echoing, illuminated glass globe you walk through, and a lesson in geo-politics unto itself.

Bean Town

Boston is a visitor magnet. One of the Jennifer relations swings through on route from her home in Los Angeles to her mom in Maine. Miles was here on a business meeting in June. The Tall Lithuanian came for a conference in November.

Sometimes Ping and I go touristing on our own. There’s always First Night, of course, and strolls through parks that constitute the Emerald Necklace. One day, we ferried from East Boston to Charlestown, checked out the new sculpture in the Navy Yard, and walked up to the Bunker Hill monument. Another weekend we strolled from Long Wharf, by the Aquarium, past Government Center to King’s Chapel to see Unbound, a memorial to the African Americans enslaved by that historic church’s clergy and members. History can be more capacious and complete than we might have once thought.

Our picture is quite elegant this year; I was lured into a studio by a deal for people and their dogs. Come to think of it, my last “formal” portrait was taken in the fall of 1968 for my senior yearbook. Have I changed much? Well, my hair was a bit darker then.

My Writing and a Poet

Looking ahead, I am hopeful that by January 2026, From the Depths: Dyslexia, Bipolar Disorder and the Triumph of Art will be in print. It’s a biography of my friend, the painter Gary Horn, and a monograph on his art. In anticipation of the project, we set up an Instagram account—@ggraythorn. Looks rather like a gallery. Gary selects the works and provides the images; I write the notes. We’re up to 84 posts as of today. That’s in addition to my usual logorrhea on this blog.

I’ve been in East Boston long enough to move into my second election cycle as a Precinct 1 inspector at Samuel Adams Elementary School. The mayoral and council preliminaries were in September and the final contests on November 4. Both days were low-key. I hope for more traffic in 2026. Elections remind me what a troubling year it has been and how much we depend on the rituals of democracy. This poem seems fitting for the moment.

Let Them Not Say (2017) by Jane Hirshfield (b. 1953)

Let them not say: we did not see it.
We saw.

Let them not say: we did not hear it.
We heard.

Let them not say: they did not taste it.
We ate, we trembled.

Let them not say: it was not spoken, not written.
We spoke,
we witnessed with voices and hands.

Let them not say: they did nothing.
We did not-enough.

Let them say, as they must say something:

A kerosene beauty.
It burned.

Let them say we warmed ourselves by it,
read by its light, praised,
and it burned.

dreaming of a white Christmas

All good things in 2026!

The post Christmas Letter 2025 appeared first on LNB Associates.

Three Musicians

The musicians include portraits of the Jewish painter and writer Max Jacob (1876-1944), the cowled monk at the right, gone from Picasso’s life into a monastery. Jacob had converted to Catholicism in 1915 and in 1918 moved to live as an oblate of unclear commitment to the Benedictine monastery in Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire, France. On the left is the poet Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) as melancholic Pierrot. Apollinaire had suffered terrible headwounds at the Front; in his fragile state, he succumbed in the flu pandemic of 1918.

Three Musicians

Between the two is Picasso, himself, the flamboyant Harlequin, an alter-ego that was the yin to the minotaur’s yang in his iconography. The dog that sits below Pierrot’s chair is, then both a symbol of friendship (fido) and of death (Cerberus).

In its classicizing structure and traditional subject, the painting is an ode to things past. In particular, it is a celebration of lasting friendship as well as a glance back to Picasso’s youth, apparently irretrievably gone. He was then a married man, an artist of stature, a Parisian bourgeois living a life of social privilege. The art historian Theodore Reff calls this painting an elegy for Picasso’s “lost bohemian youth, for freedom of the Bateau-Lavoir days and the gaiety of Apollinaire and Jacob.” (quoted in Kenneth Silver, Esprit de Corps, p. 314)

In Remembrance of Things Past

Marcel Proust (1871-1922) wrote in 1913 how the taste of a cookie returned him to his childhood:

…a shudder ran through me… An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses… The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea.

For many of us, Emma Willard School—the place, the books we read, the music we danced to, and more—is our madeleine. Our friendships are the ties that bind us not so much to “ye grey walls protecting” on the heights of Mount Ida in Troy, New York, as the sense of possibility we gained there. We did not perhaps feel it at the time, but we were in the eye of a Bergsonian hurricane of becoming.

Fabric Rewoven

through a Kellas window

Friendships sustain themselves—or don’t. The quinquennial gatherings on campus, reunions ending in aughts and fives—are an opportunity to reconnect, measure our lives by the familiar metric of peer accomplishments, miss those absent. Like the ancient Romans, we conduct our own collective and private lustrums, our inventories of gain and loss.

In our arc, the one followed by the Class of 1969, the competition innate in comparison faded as middle-age mounted. Old intimates remained so, but new intimacies emerged. Conversations with women we had barely exchanged words with as teenagers suddenly lasted long after desserts and coffees were cleared from tables, and even after many retreated to the dormitory rooms that we had borrowed for a few nights.

Why? Because now these “new” friends were bringing to us more or our pasts—more of ourselves—than we had known about. What mattered now was not who any of us had been but how our evolution into women of a certain age had begun at Emma, in that hothouse of hormones and emotional and intellectual ferment, in the experience that would always sustain us.

Fabric Frayed

I met Leslie when we had barely settled into our rooms sophomore year. We bonded instantly. She was funny. She played the trombone. She took Latin, as did I, and also Ancient Greek; we spent hours inventing Latinate plurals for common words: Kleenex, kleeneces; climax, climaces; phoenix, phoenices.

the wedding of hearts

Leslie could write and her ear for grammatical faux-pas was already advanced. Every time she heard the tagline “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should,” she’d grit her teeth. “It’s either ‘Winston tastes good like cigarette’ or ‘Winston tastes good as a cigarette should.” To this day, my issues with split infinitives focus on the Star Trek prologue: “To boldly go where no man has gone before.” Leslie’s final frontier was ensuring that every text that encountered her editor’s pencil advanced to perfection.

Her last syntactical gift to me was an email correction on a letter drafted by an alumnae committee. She wrote, “…the list of the committee members should have the apostrophes reversed, to show elided numbers.” In other words, not “Ellen Cutler ‘69” but “Ellen Cutler ’69.” I didn’t know that. But now I do.

Today

Leslie is among the most interesting people I have ever known. And the best of friends, gaps in communication and separations in space notwithstanding. It seemed a fairytale when she reconnected with Bobby, the love of her life, almost fifty years after the Prom we both attended at Deerfield Academy. When they married, I was there. She had a line from Catullus engraved in his ring: Vivamus et Amamus. Let us live and love.

He is holding her hand now. I asked him to hold it for me, too. I think I will know when she lets go.

The post Threads Pulled from My Tapestry: For Leslie appeared first on LNB Associates.

Keeping Track

Christmas morning

For years, buying those gifts was my favorite annual activity. I kept list of what I gave to whom and when. I’d spend the best part of a day in my bookstore of choice, hunched over a child’s table and a stack of books. First I had to read them all; then I had to allocate them to appropriate recipients; finally I had to double check and make a book hadn’t already been given to an older sibling. In my mind’s eye I saw a bookshelf in each house filled with my gifts.

My process—and especially those lists—got a lot of attention. All kinds of people stopped and asked questions. Some even asked for recommendations. Of course, book stores are friendly places full of people eager to share.

Success is not a Given

There are no guarantees that such gifts will be well received or read, let alone enjoyed. But every now and then, they are.

Robert, the English lad, was so enraptured with Thy Friend Obadiah by Brinton Turkle (Robert was about three at the time) that he pestered his mother incessantly to read it to him. Finally, in self-defense, Sami got a tape recorder (this was the age of cassettes), recorded herself reading Thy Friend, and taught Robert how to start, stop, and rewind the tapes.

It was an analog age and MP3 players, smart phones, and the like were still more than thirty years in the future.

The night before Robert’s wedding in 2010, my husband Dan and I joined them for family dinner. As we lingered over Sami’s utterly splendid spread and her husband Stephen’s excellent choice of wines, talk turned nostalgic. Among other things, both Robert and his sister Tali remembered their favorite books among those I had sent. For Robert, it was Paddle to the Sea by M. C. Hollings. For Tali, it was, Liza Lou and the Yeller Belly Swamp Creature by Mercer Mayer.

Robert has three beautiful daughters and they, too, get books every year.

Take the Win

This September afternoon, my great-niece Alexis texted me a photograph. Had I, by any chance, “sent this series our way? It was the set, Dragons in a Bag, The Dragon Thief, and The Witch’s Apprentice by Zetta Elliott. Why, yes, I had. I checked my lists (long ago transferred to word documents). The Elliott books were sent in 2024.

so many books

Alexis then added:

Maurice has loved it as a bed time series! we seen it at the book fair and he said “oh we have those lets start them “ it is a great read plus he is obsessed with dragons and reptiles right now so it has been perfect. Thank you!

I am all a-glow!

Choosing Books Nowadays

The Internet has replace those wonderful bookstores. The children I buy books for live distant from me, and I often have to guess at their interests and tastes. In addition, one set of kids is African American and another is Native American. I have had to reach beyond what is familiar to me.

But some of the oldies are still goodies. If Maurice is in his dragons/reptiles/probably dinosaurs phase, there is always The Enormous Egg by Oliver Butterworth and the trio by Ruth Stiles Gannett that starts with My Father’s Dragon.”

And there is always the ineffable Don Cooper and his Dino-Songs. I can still belt out, P-T-E-R-A-N-O-D-O-N spells pterandodon! Every single tune is an earworm.

The post Christmas Books: Sometimes It’s Right appeared first on LNB Associates.

It’s not an apt nickname. If feels neither like “a rain cloud” nor “a luminous vapor, cloud, or atmosphere about a god or goddess when on earth.”

Contagion

I have been spending a lot of time with cousins recently. D is battling anaplastic thyroid cancer; his daughter H doesn’t drive and it has been hard for her to get from the Boston area to the South Shore and Cape Cod. This past Thursday, I collected H and headed out on the Southeast Expressway. On Sunday, knowing that none of the usual suspects would be by to visit, I drove down in the morning. We had a fine visit. He’s been in a rather dark, tatty, faintly malodorous room, shared with another man.

Tuesday evening H texted to say the roommate had been diagnosed with Covid and that D has been moved to a different area. I was already feeling raspy and achy, and ordered a couple of Covid tests sent over from my local Walgreens. Despite their claims of immediate service, Walgreens sent them out Wednesday morning around 6:00 am. It’s a good thing each box had two tests. One box was expired. I screwed up the first test in the second box. The other confirmed I was good and sick. It was now the third day following probable infection. And, yes, D has tested positive as well.

Finding Treatment

supplies and medication

I called my physician immediately. It was 11:28 am on Wednesday. Had to leave a message. No response. Called back at 4:02 pm. Got a different person, had to leave a message.

Called back today, Thursday, at 7:39 am. Spoke to a woman who seemed to have trouble tracking Dr. F down in the gerontology practice at Beth Israel Lahey. But she took me seriously, said someone would call me back in fifteen minutes. That call arrived at 7:59 am. The prescription would be on its way as soon as she checked my other meds for conflicts. (Apparently the Atorvastatin was a conflict.)

At 9:22 am, Walgreens texted me that they didn’t have any Paxlovid in stock. So I called and after a not particularly helpful or sympathetic exchange, they said I could get it at the store on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge. But I had to call and make the order. Which I did.

The Cost of Paxlovid

I have pretty good insurance. Even so, the prescription came to $721.61. I gagged. I checked whether they had used my insurance. Apparently Paxlovid falls into the deductible. But it wasn’t $1,800, which is apparently what they charge for that little box when there is no insurance.

pricey Paxlovid

They needed me to submit a credit card so that they could fill the order and Door-Dash it to me. I followed the link. Walgreens wanted nothing to do with my credit card. I called back. The system was down in the store so the clerk couldn’t input the card number either. Didn’t I have someone who could come pick it up for me?

I’m 73 and I live alone. I don’t have friends locally I could ask to do that. Ping, my 12-pound  shapsoodle, doesn’t have a driver’s license. No, I said, I would drive my highly contagious self over to their store, shedding virus everywhere, and would they please have the prescription, two boxes of Covid tests which had not expired, and a box of N95 respirator masks together in a heap.

I wore my purple bandanna like an Old West bad guy, parked illegally, and stood in line to pay. Then I drove home.

Health Care So Bad It Isn’t a System

What do people do when they contract Covid and don’t have health insurance? If they can’t afford insurance, they surely don’t have $1,800 to shell out to save themselves, their elders, their children.

What are we supposed to do when the websites we are forced to rely on aren’t up to day, doctors are not listed in the data base, or pharmacies don’t have the functional bandwidth to accept the credit card that will purchase life-saving medications?

And In The Short Term

It seems highly unlikely that I will be attending my step-grandson’s wedding in California on September 6. My outbound flight is scheduled for September 4, and short of a miracle, I don’t expect the Paxlovid to make me virus-free in five and a half days.

It isn’t just the dress, scarf, and shoes I bought so the couple would be proud of me, the only surviving grandparent on the spear side. It certainly isn’t the loss I will sustain by cancelling the flight. It’s the fact that I love them so much and wanted to celebrate this event with them with the groom’s maternal grandfather, my late husband, in my heart.

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