Tuesday Morning, October 15 - Influences

As I contemplate the future of my domestic environment, these interior design iconoclasts are influencing my thoughts. In random order:

• Sir John Soane

• Elise de Wolfe

• Cecil Beaton

• Marie Kondo

This could get interesting!

Friday, October 11 - Gratitude and Crankiness

It might as well be said right up front that I’ve had a cold since Wednesday afternoon, so everything I’m thinking and expressing is filtered through a filter of congestion, a wee bit of fever, and a river of snot.

1) Every day, every moment, I am conscious of how much I have to be grateful for. Even having this cold - I can have it without worrying about inconveniencing anyone in an office, or volunteers! I can just sit here in my comfortable, crowded, messy house, blowing my nose every five minutes yesterday - and not inconvenience anyone.

2) A friend said “Chicken soup and old movies” for a cold, and right now I’m watching The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. In the words of the late Mrs. Lloyd Richards (Karen), “The things you remember, and the things you don’t.” I remember seeing this movie for the first time late at night in the den on Orchid Street, when it was broadcast by some local Texas TV station (and interrupted every five minutes by local election results). Because it was after bedtime, I had the volume down as low as possible and was practically sitting inside the television.

2a) Watching it this evening, it’s like the perfect romance for introverts. And at the end, after Lucy dies and she and Captain Gregg walk out of the house into the fog! Of course Bernard Hermann’s score creates the right atmosphere . . .

3) The crankiness, as so often, comes from tech-related issues; I swear I need a butler with a BS in computer science! And frankly, I am not in a place where I want to think about anything.

4) National Coming Out Day - always October 11 - brings up different thoughts, too. This year I’ve been out for 30 years. Thirty! And every day I’m thankful for the community of friends around me love and support me through all my craziness and enthusiasms. And every day I’m thankful to have been able to make Massachusetts my home, a state where Men of the Oscar Wilde Sort are welcomed much more so than in other states . . . such as ahem Louisiana.

4a) It makes me think about my parents, too, who had a lot of trouble with my decision but didn’t want me not to be in their lives.

5) Sorry to be such a crankypants, friends! Thanks for sticking with me. All I want now is a solid night’s sleep.

Friday, August 9: Kenilworth, Day Six - Kenilworth

1) For my last full day with them, the boys planned a light day seeing the neighborhood historic house: Kenilworth Castle! It’s a 20-minute walk from their home! All JP has to offer is the Loring-Greenough House, which is a postage stamp compared to this expansive ruin.

And there it was!

2) There are so many little twisty ways in and out of Paul and Christian’s little neighborhood of wide streets and big sky (I didn’t see any large old trees in the immediate vicinity). This time we went a different way, and before you knew it, a big ol’ honkin’ section of ruin came into view.

3) We three walked along, sometimes single file, sometimes three abreast as the walkway permitted. To enter the castle grounds we had to cross the roadway at a curve where I couldn’t see what was coming in either direction and NO crosswalk or traffic light or stop sign. So, since I was far too busy enjoying this vacation to get into some sort of accident requiring hospitalization, I had a bit of a moment mauvais.

Of course England looks like this.

4) The whole ruinous mass, including the approach, is just what We Americans think England is - and ought to be. (Not a ruin, of course, but of a majestic natural beauty that appears to have been tamed satisfactorily.)

The approach.

5) We paid our money and I went through the wrong turnstile or something, and then off we went into the grounds. First stop: the gatehouse, which had been used as a private residence as late as the 1930s. These were the only interiors there were to see, and this included the last room that had anything left over from the Actual Castle Before It Fell Apart, as well as some museum exhibition rooms on upper floors. What we saw was charming.

The entrance to the gatehouse.

An interior in the gatehouse. The mantel used to be in the castle.

6) After that, though, we came to the real Piece of Resistance (as the French say): the recreated Elizabethan privy garden. Opened in 2009 after painstaking research, Whoever Was Responsible For This looked not only at period documents and illustrations, but archeological evidence of exactly where the garden was, and what was planted where and how. Needless to say, I was enchanted.

My last view of the garden, but I include it at the start of my tour of it to give an idea of its scope.

We were so fortunate with the weather!

There was a great deal of lavender in the garden.

6a) This was also a helpful reminder that the Elizabethans planted their gardens for scent as much as sight, if not more so. This very day (in October) I was explaining to a friend that the Tudor court moved from castle to castle so often so they could scrub up, since all the men just pissed in the corners wherever they were. Fancy living in a toilet! Bleah! And bathing wasn’t exactly a daily custom, either. So the people of this period valued plants with a sweet smell, perhaps even more than those with a pretty blossom.

Yip, yip, yip!

6b) Oh yes, I was all “Yip yip yip!” excited going through this garden, and having inspired thoughts about my condo association’s triangular plot - just like I did in 2008 after getting to visit Versailles and the kitchen gardens of Marie Antoinette’s fantasy farm village Le Hameau. The difference now, of course, is that my time is my own in the spring!

My patient hosts.

7) Paul and Christian made it up the stairs sooner than I did (they were very patient - but then, they’ve seen it all before, more than once), and we continued our tour through the ruins. Looking at the photos now, two months later, I think “Who cares if that’s the kitchen, or what part of the castle it is? The garden is so beautiful!” But these ruins had true scope and grandeur, and it was thrilling - and a bit scary - to ascend to the windswept heights to look over the surrounding countryside.

The garden from far above.

7a) Insert John of Gaunt’s Speech Here.

The joy that is Christian. It really was windy up there!

7b) Marvelous, too, to see how the wind was carving furrows in the stones of the castle. It made me think immediately of the tombstones in Whitby, which I got to see in 2013.

8) The time came for us to head out, and of course we stopped by the shop. I was mad to get a book about the garden, but the only one they had was gulp 40 euros. Worth the investment, but sweet mercy goodness. I was hoping for a pamphlet along the lines of How We Did It.

9) Back across the road - another moment mauvais pour moi - to lunch at the neighborhood pub, the Clarendon Arms. (There were other neighborhood institutions we never did get to take in during this busy week. I will have to return . . .) I remember a pleasant atmosphere, and aperol spritzes for me.

My only shot in the Indian restaurant.

10) In the evening we boarded a bus and went across Kenilworth to a superb Indian restaurant where Paul and Christian were well known and the décor was maybe a bit Blade Runner nightclub: gold and silver brocade, blue neon. My test of an Indian restaurant is tandoori chicken or chicken tikka masala. Curry just doesn’t sit well with me; it gives me bad dreams. Everything we ordered was just superb.

11) By the time dinner ended it was chucking down rain, and the nice maitre d’ called a taxi for us. I’m afraid I created some confusion because I keep forgetting that English cars have their steering wheels on the other side.

Monday Morning, October 7 - Wedding Ring

1) One of the big discoveries after Mother died was finding my father's wedding ring (which he never wore - he wasn't a ring guy), which had been his mother’s. I don’t think she wore it much either, which might explain why she gave it to Daddy for his wedding in 1955.

2) Grampa, who was so poor he had to get married in his Army uniform ‘cause he couldn’t afford a suit, obviously didn’t have a lot of money to spend on a ring, either. For all I know he picked this one up at a dime store.

3) We’d always been told that it was engraved on the inside “Love is reflected in love.” I’m wearing it today, stacked with a couple jade and rose quartz rings I got in Provincetown, and I took it off to look at the inscription. There it is, in capital letters: “LOVE IS REFLECTED IN LOVE.” But right after it I noticed for the first time in smaller letters: “To M.E.” (Granny’s name was Mary Ella.) I love that Grampa personalized the ring for her in that way; it makes it that much more special.

Thursday, August 8: Kenilworth, Day Five - Oxford!

1) Of all the excursions Paul and Christian had planned for me, I was looking forward to visiting Oxford most. Because I actually have a family connection there. Way back in the 1930s, my cousin Rhodes Dunlap was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, and I determined that we would find the college where he studied.

1a) An internet search before I left home revealed it to be St. Edmund Hall, also known as Teddy Hall, which is not one of those Oxford colleges anyone in American has ever heard of.

2) Christian arranged for first-class rail tickets for us, so we traveled in some comfort to Oxford. Leaving the station, I felt we had to swim our way through a sea of parked bicycles to get to the road.

Me in front of cousin Rhodes’s college, Teddy Hall.

3) And before I realized it, poof! We were in front of Teddy Hall! Christian had actually looked it up beforehand. Those boys have a genius for finding a destination by artless wandering. Alas, Teddy Hall wasn’t open to tourists.

I don’t even know what an Aularian is, so couldn’t pretend to be one.

4) I loved getting to experience Oxford as a small city, which helped me to visualize more clearly scenes from Nancy Mitford’s novels The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate.

Aren’t they adorable?

5) We continued our meandering and stopped at a near-empty pub for a bottle elevenses.

6) Then we toured Magdalen College (which is pronounced maudlin, as in “You’re maudlin and full of self-pity. You’re magnificent”). Beautiful, austere, and deserted except for the tourists.

6a) It really is just as beautiful as it is in the movies.

7) So if the main event for me was tracking down Teddy Hall, for Christian it was a swish luncheon at Brasserie Blanc, a very discreet and subtle restaurant of slated-painted wainscoting and marvelous food and wine. I wish I had taken photos. As it was, I rose from the table in a semi-somnambulant state.

8) We passed an old haberdasher, which turned out to be the famous Walter’s of Oxford. Paul and Christian insisted that I purchase for myself a bow tie they saw in the window. While inside, I browsed through their selection of waistcoats and found something splendid to wear on the Queen Mary II: peacock blue satin embroidered with silver and blue peacock feathers.

Walter’s really does care about their customers.

8a) I kept imagining what it was like when cousin Rhodes shopped there; he must have.

9) Our promenade through Oxford ended up in an enormous bookstore, where I was most eager to attend to an Angry Ounce. Later I got so engrossed in a book that Paul had to text me that they were out on the street. Oops!

10) We then had a pint in an obscure-but-famous pub a few storefronts down. En route, I overheard a mother blessing out her young child in French (they were probably actually French, not academics raising their children bilingually), which just proved that no matter what it is, it sounds better in French.

11) By this time the mood was a bit subdued - and getting closer to train time - and I was allowed to pop into a shop to do a bit of Christmas shopping in advance. And then we retraced our steps through busy, picturesque Oxford for our train.

12) I remember jolly conversation and complimentary bags of chips in first class on the journey home.

Saturday Morning, October 5 - The Week That Was

“First the bees left the hive. Then I washed my hair. Those were the two exciting events of my day.”

— Greta Garbo in Camille (1936)

My week was more exciting that Greta Garbo’s day in the country, but like hers, it was punctuated with specific events that left an impression:

1) Now we all know my home could be described as Polly’s in Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate: “. . . her household arrangements were casual to the verge of chaos.” Since 2003 I’ve had some beautiful Oriental rugs that belonged to my grandmother, but I have not stewarded them as well as they deserve. Wednesday the Nice Men from the Rug Company came to collect them for cleaning, which involved a lot of furniture moving. Until they are returned a month or so from now, I’ll be getting reacquainted with my wood floors.

2) Wednesday night I saw the BLO’s new production of I Pagliacci, which I had never seen staged before. I especially sought this out because they chose to stage it very differently; instead of pairing it with Cavalleria Rusticana in a theatre, as is typical, they converted an ice rink into a circus tent set in a fairground. You spent an hour-ish in the fairgrounds playing games of chance and watching acrobats and clowns do their stuff (and talking over the community chorus singing church music, the only off-topic element of the evening), and then entered the big top. A one-ring circus in a tent of blue and orange stripes, the orchestra was squashed into a pie shape behind the round stage. At the beginning I was startled by two things: a) the opera was sung in English and I was expecting Italian, and b) the costumes were all modern dress. After reflection though, the decisions were entirely right - and the evening was riveting.

3) Thursday evening I attended the HistoryMaker Awards, now at the St. Botolph Club. An evening to see old friends and make new ones - and to reflect on the future in an atmosphere of the past.

4) Friday I met a Friend of Noted Opinion for lunch in Back Bay - mighty good talk, mighty good talk! Afterward we passed the time shopping, and I was surprised to find myself picking up a sweater and house shoes for the coming winter. For all my love of Bold, Uncompromising Color, one of my very favorite colors is pale grey, and these new things absolutely delighted me.

5) The impending close of Doyle’s . . . I ignore it, but I can’t escape it. Yesterday I noticed that the October placemat pretty much acknowledges that they won’t make it to November.

Friday Night, October 4

1) Let’s get this weekend started!

2) I told you I was reading about World War I.

2a) This is, of course, Gloria Paul as Crepes Suzette in Darling Lili.

2b) And this is what Julie Andrews did with that information.

3) God bless musical theatre.

Wednesday Morning, October 2

1) Back porch coffee on this soft morning: soft light, soft green colors, soft cool breeze. It’s like late spring or early summer. The sleepiness in my head is not soft, though. Which is why God made coffee.

1a) The honking of Canada geese betrays that this is really autumn.

2) Coming and going. Today the rain is coming. Also the rug people, who will cart away my gramma’s Oriental rugs for a good deep cleaning. And I am going, in the rain, to the opera. BLO is performing I Pagliacci tonight, which I have never seen.

3) It’s been eight months.

Monday, September 30

1) The coverage of the impeachment inquiry starting in Washington has made me think a lot about Mother today, wondering how she would react. She raised us on “Honesty is the best policy.”

1a) And in this case, the corollary - which Mother would not have said - comes from Florence Jefferson: “What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the turkey!”

2) I confess I’m having a bit of trouble establishing a daily routine that’s productive for writing (not helped by the continuing chaos in this house). A fabulous piece by Amy Alkon via ye Twyttre is helping: “There’s No Such Thing as Writer’s Block.”

3) The great singer, and Interlochen camper, Jessye Norman has died. I vaguely remember a news story in the Globe (I can’t find it in their online archive) about her helping, with her chauffeur, to foil a bank robbery near the stage entrance of Symphony Hall.

3a) Her recording of Strauss’s Four Last Songs is truly beautiful. And it reminds me so vividly of Boston Ballet’s production of the ballet to those songs by Rudi van Dantzig.

Wednesday, August 7: Kenilworth, Day Four - Birmingham

1) Up and at ‘em! We faced a fairly early start by train to today’s destination: Birmingham and its Museum of the Jewellery Quarter. I confess I was feeling a few affer effects of the splendid wines we’d enjoyed over dinner at the Cross the previous evening.

2) The view of Birmingham from the train as we arrived was spacious, modern, and industrial. As we left the station and proceeded to the museum, that changed to an atmosphere that was gritty, antique, decaying, and industrial.

3) This view I took in at quickening speed and with mounting impatience. While Etiquetteer is giving me the Hairy Eyeball for Referring to Bodily Function, it’s necessary to mention that I was afflicted by an Angry Ounce. In short . . . .Daddy had to pee real bad. And none of the intersections we crossed were ever the turn to the museum!

Me thinking about jewelry. :-)

4) Now in planning for the trip, Paul had mentioned going to a jewelry museum, and I thought “Fabulous! Enormous glittering gemstones and innovative design!” Well . . . as it turned out, not quite. The museum is actually based on the workshop and office of Smith & Pepper, a venerable old firm mostly known for its gold snake bracelets. The place is exactly as they left it in 1981 when they walked out, locked the doors, and never came back. Imagine!

5) As soon as the tickets had been bought I bolted for the men’s room, and then had to bolt for the start of the guided tour. At least I wasn’t the last one to join the group.

Jewelers’ smocks hung at the workroom entrance.

6) The tour was fascinating, actually - zero regrets about the absence of egg-sized emeralds or other Important Jewels. First the office, where jewelry was given its final touches and where all the accounting and things got done, and then the workroom floor, where the jewelers worked. Smith and Pepper actually made gold buttons for uniforms, and we were all shown how the stamps and other presses worked. Everyone on the tour was given a tiny brass Scottie dog and a button stamp with a Roman head on it as samples.

7) I then had to take care of another Angry Ounce - most frustratining! - after which I resumed touring the museum’s galleries of 19th- and 20th-century British jewelry. I am consternated that I don’t seem to have any photos of the jewelry.

8) After one final visit to the men’s room - Christian made a point of commenting on this unusual frequency - and bypassing the shop which didn’t look compelling, we set out to see a bit of his very old neighborhood. An interesting mix of dereliction and up-and-coming edginess.

9) Before embarking for home, we stopped at a delightful little wine bar near the station to be refreshed. Christian and Paul had been there before, and we enjoyed tapas and a bottle of 2012 syrah. It was also a wine store, and I was pleased to find a bottle of that stimulating rioja we’d enjoyed the night I arrived in Kenilworth.

10) We dined in that night - those boys took such good care of me! - and watched a 2017 film I hadn’t seen, God’s Own Country, daring, original, emotionally brutal. And it reminded me how many different, and difficult, choices actors make when creating and inhabiting a character.

Sunday, September 22

1) Not really a great day. At least . . . not a day that went according to plan. I didn’t get anything written, and I certainly didn’t clean anything (except myself). I didn’t go outside until it was time to go to yoga, missing what I gather was a wonderful warm day.

2) instead, I harnessed some energy to start organizing the chaos of the dining room, going through mail and old papers to toss, adding things to the pile for the (eventual) yard sale. I’m tired of eating at a table stacked so high with papers!

2a) The dining room is now very full of my gramma’s dining room furniture, which we’ve learned is from a popular mid-century outfit known as Cushman Colonial: table with two leaves, six chairs, sideboard, china cabinet, footstool (Gramma was very short) . . . and a desk. Gramma always kept in her dining room; Mother kept it with the table and chairs in the her kitchen. I’ve always loved the entire suite, as I’ve always loved everything chosen by Gramma.

2b) I thought the desk had been shipped up empty . . . and I was wrong. One drawer is filled up with old letters, and I might have been responsible for that; I honestly don’t remember. There is another drawer filled with stationery that Mother hadn’t yet used (including half a box of notecards from the Met, which had become a tradition for me to give her). Yet another had a bit more stationery, some correspondence from 2001-2005, and a wooden napkin holder carved as a flower Mother bought in Hawaii in 1977. One drawer contained high school yearbooks for Mother, Daddy, and Uncle Bill.

2c) But the last drawer, to my horror, contains most of my elementary school pictures, as well as (without any horror at all) a bag of 60th wedding anniversary greetings, another bag of Christmas and other greetings, and a box of old letters from when Mother was in college. I was not expecting any of these things!

3) Among those photos was a standup frame of clear plastic with the photo of me at the airport before flying away to freshman year of college. Behind that photo was a photo of me that I do not remember at all - but clearly from 1991, because I remember getting that sweater at ye Yddye Bywyre before the painful phone conversation with my dad about me being gay. I post it here just to prove that, then as now, my hair is really all I have to offer.

3a) “Where were we going that night, Lloyd and I?" The things you remember . . . and the things you don’t.”

Tuesday, August 6: Kenilworth, Day Three - Coventry

1) Coventry is just a ten-minute train from Kenilworth, so we didn’t have to make a very early start. Indeed, it could be said that the day got off in a leisurely way not least because it was Christian’s birthday and he had cards and things to look through.

2) We exited Coventry Station onto a wide plaza populated with walking commuters, and I was seized with the sensation (as the day before leaving Warwick Castle) of wondering if anyone knew where we were going. As it happened we headed into a very modern-industrial-retro coffee shop (all exposed brick and wiring and edison light bulbs) for flat whites and cookies to fuel us for the adventures ahead.

Coventry Town Hall selfie. Observe how carefully I’ve centered myself. :-)

3) Before we got to our first destination, several things were pointed out to me, including Coventry Town Hall. Seeing some graffiti that made me wonder if Banksy had been through, we investigated further. Turns out it’s a portrait memorial to the woman who “realized the theme music” of Doctor Who! Happy thoughts of my friends who are fans of The Doctor.

Not a Banksy, but a memorial to Delia Ann Derbyshire.

4) And finalmente, we entered The Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, a fine vigorous little museum with a vision and perhaps a random collection. Large, interesting exhibition on the history of Coventry featuring local manufactures, fashions, and technology; I was reading with absorption about dial telephones when Christian started blessing me out that we’d come into the exhibition through the wrong entrance and were at the end and not the beginning. So I tore myself away to do it properly. Who knew Coventry had been a center of world ribbon production?!

Rotary phones!

4a) Paul surprised me with a present of a beautifully-mounted section of elaborately woven silk ribbon depicting the old and new Coventry cathedrals. Wow!

5) TECH RANT [please skip ahead if you’d rather not be bothered]. This was my first trip overseas with a smartphone to use as a camera and - as wonderful as the camera on the smartphone is - next time I’ll bring a regular camera that doesn’t have to upload everything into the Stupid Cloud. All the time I was away I had difficult uploading photos, and NOW I swear they all didn’t upload AND they weren’t uploaded in the order in which they were taken. Technology is supposed to make our lives EASIER, isn’t it?! Ridiculous! END TECH RANT.

Naughty!

6) The rest of the museum was notable for an exhibition on the history of Lady Godiva in art (I felt so stupid having forgotten that OF COURSE Lady Godiva took her famous ride through Coventry), the concept of Peace, and one random gallery of random Old Masters. The latter included a cabinet of drawers filled with curiosities, and I’m afraid Paul and I giggled like naughty schoolboys over a scale to weigh gold that appeared to depict bizarre sexual practices.

The hall in the Guild Hall. Those chairs are not period.

7) After a quick pass through the shop (as well as a little stationery shop down the road my friends indulgently allowed me to explore), we passed by the ruins of Coventry Cathedral to tour the Guild Hall. The hall itself is a fine splendid room with some remarkable stained glass and interesting ceiling carvings.

In the words of the late Mame Dennis, '“Perhaps she’ll wake up without her head tomorrow.”

7a) There’s also a Mary Queen of Scots’ Room, as I gather Mary passed through here in custody at one point. I was the first to get the irony of the “Please mind your head” sign on the door. I must say, the stackable banquet chairs in this room were NOT of the Tudor period!

No . . . no, the chairs are NOT period!

7b) When I was little and my parents got us a World Book Encyclopedia, there were two subjects on which i read everything: the Presidents and First Ladies, and Mary Queen of Scots.

Exterior of the Guild Hall courtyard. That overhang is just going to fall off some day.

8) We then repaired to the little café in the basement for lunch: sandwiches and wine, as I recall. The whole place very much like a church hall concession, but with alcohol. We made friends with the barmaid on the way out. Paul and Christian plan to return the next time they’re in Coventry.

The bombed Coventry Cathedral, with the new cathedral to its side.

9) The entrance to the ruined cathedral was just across the way. Thoughtfully and beautifully maintained as a memorial, and as a visible reminder of the need for Peace, I found myself reflecting on the crisis in world leadership all of us face right now.

10) I lingered a bit too long, and Christian and Paul were waiting outside the entrance to the new cathedral for me. Inside, very mid-century (not a style I’m particularly fond of), but I was interested to see how the architects and designers had reimagined traditional forms in new ways or with new materials. This was very much like the interior of Lincoln Center, which took the traditional red-velvet-and-gold theatre interior and did something new with it.

10a) Some sort of drumming/percussion rehearsal was taking place - so restful, so conducive to contemplation. I drifted back to a small, round, very bright chapel filled with an exhibition of Chinese embroidery. Really exquisite pieces, very finely done - the sort of thing I would want to tell Mother all about because she would have loved it - and Gramma, too.

One of the many exquisite embroideries. Sorry about the the reflections.

10b) We stopped in another chapel on the way out, this one filled with exhibitions on social justice and activism, as well as a centerpiece of origami cranes. By this time I was just done with all that drumming and ready to go.

Coventry undergoing repairs.

11) Again, drifting down sidewalks, not clear to me if we had a destination in mind or not, but quite lovely and interesting. And then we found a church much more my style, the Church of the Holy Trinity. Appearing unhampered by anything newer than the late 19th century, in fact the central window had been blown out during the bombing in World War II. Its replacement, rather than something aggressively modern, harmonizes beautifully with the architecture and other elements of the church. It also has the unique feature of a Christ with no facial hair!

A beardless Christ!

12) We took in a couple other sites en route to the train station, but I’m damned if I can find the photos.

The Great Western Window of the Church of the Holy Trinity, Christ in Majesty.

13) I feel sure I had a rejuvenating NAP before what was truly the big event of the day: Christian’s birthday dinner at The Cross, the Michelin-starred restaurant in Kenilworth. They have a dress code, and every time I made an allusion to traveling light in the run-up to the trip, Christian would hasten to remind me not to forget my jacket for this dinner. (I include this because I know Christian will read it and this will make him smile.) And I’m glad I didn’t because it was really nice. (I must say, we three scrubbed up very nicely, too, but I can’t find any photos to prove it.) We walked over - it was only about 15 minutes - and squashed in at a high top for a drink in the bar before dinner. The bar had a low ceiling, so I felt like I had to keep watching my head.

The bar at The Cross.

13a) The dining room where we were seated later, however, was quite spacious. The spirit of Mrs. Moorehead must have been with us, because we were seated next to a towering arrangement of Lovely Rubrums; Christian wisely had them sent away, as the scent really was overpowering after a bit.

“My my, what lovely rubrums!”

13b) I started off with the smoked salmon, and then a salad - both of them looked like Jackson Pollock might have been involved. It was “a little poem of a dinner,” as the chef in O. Henry’s short story The Renaissance at Charleroi might have said - the main course may have been poultry - though the remaining details are a bit hazy due to the excellent wines Christian chose and the passage of time.

Smoked salmon to start.

14) It was a beautiful clear night for a walk home, after a grave threat of rain during the evening (we chose not to risk sitting in the garden), and I believe I fell into bed like a stone.

This is a salad.

Friday, September 20 - The Last Days at Doyle's Begin

1) Since the first announcement came by surprise September 11 that Doyle’s would be closing, the tide of “last-timers” has been swelling ever greater. Shoot, when I went down for a late lunch this afternoon, I saw a large van from the Council on Aging for a town about 20 miles away.

1a) For the most part, these “last-timers” appear to be either very elderly or families with very young children. If any of these people were regulars, it was well before my time.

2) Seriously, the place is jammed. It’s a pity they didn’t announce the closing six months ago, which might’ve generated enough business for them to stay open!

2a) And the noise! Tonight the front room and the center room were like bubbling, simmering pots of soup, the volume at boiling point, but with the occasional bubble of barking and roaring above the din from another part of the room.

3) All this crush today meant that a) I had to eat lunch at the bar, which I have done perhaps only twice before, and b) wait 25 minutes for a table tonight.

4) But once I got seated tonight - at a table in the center room near the old phone booth - the waitress came to me and said “One of Rick’s booths just opened up.” And I dashed for one of my favorite four booths on the other side of the room, and Rick Berlin Himself looked after me.

5) All this “last-timer” traffic has slammed the kitchen, so much so that now they’re only offering a limited menu. At least I can still get my salmon salad with Italian on the side, but there are no club sandwiches of any kind.

Earlier this week - comparatively calm, but full.

6) I am finally reading Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes's Hollywood, by Karina Longworth, creator of the You Must Remember This podcast. That’s my thing: I sit in my booth and read and eat my dinner. More than once tonight - more than once at every meal I’ve had there in the last ten days - I’ve been unable to read, only to look up at the air between the ceiling and everyone’s heads, believing but unable to fathom that soon these rooms will no longer exist.

6a) Because it seems inevitable that the future of the site will not include the Doyles building, but yet another condo building, perhaps as tall as five stories. When I think how much trouble the developer behind my home had about ten years ago when he wanted to tear down what had been the Doyle’s stable . . . but I don’t know what the preservationists would think of a building like Doyle’s that gives every appearance of having been “loved to death.”

7) I think some of the staff are still shellshocked. How can they have time to process everything when they are run off their feet by the crowds?

8) I’d say the countdown continues, but no one seems to have an idea of how long we have to count. I am hopeful they can at least make it through Hallowe’en . . . for one thing because my birthday is a few days before Hallowe’en.

The back room.

Saturday, September 14

1) MORNING: Up at seven, parlor coffee and devotional, breakfast, laundry, and two hours of yard work with my third floor neighbor. Mostly we tamed the front hedge and weeded, but the more important task was to add a few bricks into a small space of ground near the front steps.

1a) For about 20 minutes of all this we were really talking with our next-door neighbor, the local handyman, who hadn’t met the new third-floor neighbor - AND happens to be a good friend of the soon-to-be-new owner of the second floor!

2) AFTERNOON: Lunch at home, an adventurous Etiquetteer project (look for it to be posted tomorrow . . . ), and then I slept like the dead for about 90 minutes. Y’know, both my parents mastered the 20-minute nap. Every day of his work life Daddy would come home for lunch and then nap in his recliner for 20 minutes, and go back to work. After he left Mother would have her 20-minute nap. I just cannot nap for that short a time! At least an hour, more often more.

3) Musical obsessions will just seize me, I admit. Because I’m going to see the BLO to I Pagliacci next month, I happened to look up Nedda’s aria, “Qual Fiamma Avea Nel Guardo!... Hui! Stridono Lassù,” and I just can’t let it go. I’m so grateful I found it, because I was being worn out by the musical numbers in Erich von Stroheim’s The Great Gabbo. “Every Now and Then” and the march-tempo “I’m in Love With You” have always been favorites, but damn . . . they were killing me.

Thursday Afternoon, September 12

1) This doesn’t happen often these days, but last night Insomnia wore me out. What a harpy she is!

1a) It’s almost the cocktail hour, but I think I’m going to have to take a good long walk to get through this evening’s assigned tasks.

2) I got some good work done in the archives at the Gibson House, including finding a couple letters relating to a 1911 family wedding at the summer house in Nahant.

3) It is so very gray today! But the cool is welcome.

Wednesday Night, September 11

1) This evening I enjoyed the first of what will surely be an extensive series of farewell dinners at Doyle’s, this with my friend from Lago di Carlo ye Pawylle Hyrtte Myllyre. Over the course of the evening we were speculating about the future of the location (without a liquor license), and a few possibilities came up:

• The Midway across the street could take it over with their liquor license.

• Marijuana dispensary. We already have an MBTA bus yard in the ‘hood, why not something else with pungent fumes, LOL? The parking lots make this seem very likely to me.

• Yoga studio

• Dog kennel (this actually came from my third-floor neighbor)

• Museum of local history with café concession and ability to BYOB. (But don’t we already have the Loring-Greenough House for that?)

• Dry cleaner

1a) I must say, the place was jammed tonight, mostly families with young (loud) children. Haven’t seen a crowd like that on a week night in a long time.

2) Next month I’ll be going to see the BLO’s production if I Pagliacci, which I don’t really know well and have never seen staged. This afternoon I remembered that at one point I’d heard Nedda’s big aria, and sought it out on the Yewtybbe. How beautiful! There’s a point where the orchestra is trembling in romantic excitement, right along with her.

3) Somethin’s blowin’ in the wind . . . and it’s making me sneeze . . . and it’s making me anxious about our national future.

Wednesday Morning, September 11

1) So yesterday was . . . interesting. Things seemed to happen simultaneously, and you know how much I enjoy multitasking. The morning’s pest control inspection, which confirmed an uneasy suspicion, was interrupted by the announcement via text that the second floor sold to a couple that has no children . . . yet. In the afternoon a surprise phone call from someone at Interlochen led to a productive conversation. During it, however, I got the first of many private messages that the unthinkable had become inevitable: DOYLE’S WAS CLOSING.

1a) Now anyone who knows me well knows that I eat at Doyle’s a lot - often twice a week - since I moved into the neighborhood 16 years ago. And even before that, whenever I would come out to JP to visit my friend Michael, I’d want to meet him at Doyle’s. There’s nothing better than one of those small box booths for two in the center room, with a good book or a good friend, for a cocktail and a chat. And it has been there FOREVER.

1b) First they came for Brasserie JO, and I had four farewell dinners there, and mourned, and moved on, ‘cause I no longer lived in the neighborhood. Then they came for Durgin-Park, and well . . . they’d been cooking for the tourists for YEARS, so in spite of its storied career, its actual importance was a myth. NOW, though - DOYLE’S is not just part of the fabric of everyday Boston, it’s part of the fabric of my every day.

1c) I will not miss walking by the bacchanalia of Saint Patrick’s Day, but I will miss the hoopla of the annual road race.

2) Up late this morning, back porch coffee and for devotional, this essay called “Life Is Short.” Quotable Quote: “The things that matter aren't necessarily the ones people would call "important." Having coffee with a friend matters. You won't feel later like that was a waste of time.”

3) Accomplishing a little task, especially one that’s been put off, can make you feel great. For years we have not had proper name plates over our doorbells. When I was in London I found exactly what I wanted at a “traditional” hardware store on Kensington High Street. Yesterday waiting for the pest control inspector I finally tacked them into place, and it feels great to have that done now.

Tuesday Morning, September 10

1) Parlor coffee and devotional. This morning I began with Mother’s Interpreter’s Bible, in which I was directed to Timothy II. Among other verses, Mother had underlined 2:24-25: “A servant of our Lord must not quarrel, but be gentle to all men, apt at teaching and patient, So that he may discipline gently those who argue against him; and perhaps God will grant them repentance and they will know the truth.”

1a) This had added resonance for me today, having learned last night of an event put on by a Prominent Conservative Organization called Bring Your Bible to School Day. Now Freedom of Religion is one thing - a valuable freedom in a nation of freedoms - but carrying a Bible shouldn’t be the first, second, or even third way to identify yourself as a Christian. Aren’t Christians supposed to be easily recognized by their behavior? Doesn’t the hymn go “And they’ll know we are Christians by our love?”

1b) This also reminds me that Mother was fond of quoting “A soft answer turneth away wrath.”

2) Cushman Colonial rock maple.

3) At home today - the pest control people are coming midday - but then a Gibson House benefit committee tonight will bring me into town.

Monday Evening, September 9

1) Today started my first full week at home since I left ye Instytytte at the end of July. I’d be scared to death if I wasn’t so sleepy.

1a) So I am actually going to be at home next weekend - and I will be holding a yard sale Saturday morning! Look soon for more details.

2) This morning, writing to a friend, I had occasion to remember the central message of Kathleen Tessaro’s novel Elegance: “Never be seduced by anything that isn’t first-rate.” This evening, reading the news, I considered that’s never more true than when thinking of one’s leaders, political or otherwise - but especially political. “Never be seduced by anything that isn’t first-rate.”

3) I was at a yoga weekend at the home of friends in Vermont - just got back last night - and it reinforced what I already knew - Daddy has to get to work! Oof!

Friday Morning, September 6

“I ran away . . . and these kind friends have taken me in. I wanted to be quiet and think things over.” — the Countess Olenska, The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton

1) Today is a Friday that feels like a Saturday. I drove up to Vermont last night with one of my friends who is hosting an informal yoga weekend. Soaking in a hot tub at midnight looking at more stars than one can see in the city, a line of trees in the distance backlit by the lights of a distant town - it’s all so beautiful and so remote.

2) There are three of us here right now - my hosts and myself - each of us operating independently about our own business. Unfortunately for me that is mostly brooding about having caused offense to someone (not to anyone here) whose attitude has changed and now resembles Prince Albert’s to his uncle after his marriage to Queen Victoria: “You will confine yourself to family matters.” And yet there are so many more practical things that require my attention . . . and I have this glorious day in the beautiful beautiful place in which to accomplish things!

3) This morning with my first cup of coffee in hand I saw a flock of 19 turkeys of different sizes stalking into a field! And just now a hummingbird flitting and hovering by the large windows. To me these are harbingers of a good weekend to come.