I arrive in Santa Fe on July 5.  Northern New Mexico reminds me of Tuscany: the art, the old families, the fresco colors, the great food.  There is something to be said for the mixture of sun and adobe, and light and shadow.  I have decided to treat myself to huevos rancheros every morning I awake in New Mexico.  This morning I am at one of the Village Inn franchises, and the “huevos” are “over easy” on a corn tortilla, smothered in green chili sauce, with pinto beans on side.  There are a lot of choices to be made when ordering.  Red or Green sauce?  How do you want the eggs?  Corn or flower tortillas?  Pinto beans, refried beans, or hash browns?  I ask for an extra order of flower tortillas to use as bread.  This is the traditional New Mexico style, with cheddar cheese melted in with the beans, and the whole ensemble running together when you break the yoke.  I am staying at a local secret, the El Rey Inn on Cerillos Road, an old-style, white painted, adobe motel straight out of the 1940s, but elegant, with lots of tile and shutters and graceful rooms which are more like suites.

After breakfast, I set out for the central Plaza, parking at the public garage on San Francisco Street.  I walk across the plaza and into the Palace of Governors and connecting Santa Fe Art Museum, which take up the northern side of the square.  Inside is a visiting exhibit from the Phillips Museum in Washington, D.C., of American Impressionism, like European Impressionism, but with a bit more diffused light and more realism.  The French is more two dimensional, using gray shading to provide perspective.  I enjoy Theodore Robinson, George Innes, J. Alden Weir, and especially Childe Hassam’s “Washington Arch in Spring,” expressing the new cosmopolitanism emerging in New York City in the 1890s.  Robert Spencer’s “A Women Ironing” reminded me of Millet.  There were some nice Taos Group painters from the early 1900s: Leon Gaspard’s “Taos Girl,” a bit abstract with lots of browns; Robert Henri’s “Maria in Wraps;” and a Gustave Baumann wood block with orange colors entitled “Frijoles Canyon.”  After the gallery, I explore the Plaza, browsing in the La Fonda Hotel gift shop.  I am attracted to their fossils, in particular, to a calcified turtle shell from South Dakota, chalky white.  I have been eyeing it for some time.   Leaving the La Fonda, I  wander over to Ortegas’ gift shop, also on the Plaza, buying a small, rectangular, silver Hopi belt buckle, before heading back to my room for a siesta.

Waking around three o’clock, I ask the desk clerk where I can find some good tacos.  He recommends a taco stand across the street, “The Burrito Stop,” which looks like a converted drive-in.   It is near two other stands that I know, “El Parasol” and “Felipes,”  also on Cerillos.   I ordered “carne adovada, shredded beef tacos, which they simply called “beef tacos.”  The tacos were, indeed, very good, large, and with a slightly smoky aroma, and the thin green taco sauce is not too spicy.  The shells were home made, dipped, still hot and only slightly oily, and irregularly shaped, with  a mixture of white and cheddar cheese sprinkled on top, covering a heaping pile of lettuce over the beef.  These were authentic Mexican, the new fad, rather than Tex Mex or New Mexican, tacos which we are used to.  The two employees, cook and waiter, were Mexicans, thin, like vaqueros, the real thing, serious, quiet, ranchero types.  Confirming my hunch,  I notice the only other car in the parking area is a Toyota Corolla parked at the side with Texas plates.  New immigrants perhaps, just in from the border.  I offer them thanks and get professional nods of appreciation in return.  The new immigrants are hard workers, entrepreneurs.

Knowing I have but one night in town, I decide to return to the Plaza.  I take Guadalupe Street, walking past the rail yards, Cowgirl Cafe, and Thomasitas Restaurant, my usual dinner stop.  That evening, I sit on a bench in the Plaza and do some people watching.  The streets are empty, unusually so, as a cowboy on his Appaloosa horse rides around the square, repeatedly.  I nod, and he nods back.  He is straight out of the 19th Century, full white mustache, tall hat, chaps, denim shirt, bandana, and a blue heeler dog trotting along beside, as he continues his nice pace, “clop, clop, clop,” on the pavement.  I notice the second time around that he has a cloth boot tied to the side of the horse, like a pouch, carrying an Australian shepherd pup, tan and white, its head sticking out.  They looked like a happy group, except the pup would like to be outside the boot.  Stretching my legs, I walk over to Don Gaspar street a couple of blocks away, admiring the photos in the Edward Curtis gallery.  I’m looking for my favorite, of native American horsemen riding through Canyon de Chelly, with its streaked gully walls as a backdrop.

The chimes are ringing at St. Francis Cathedral as walk along, reading the plaques on buildings, showing their 17th and 18th Century provenance.  If you are looking for place, next to Santa Barbara, Santa Fe may be the best place I have found.  After dark, I walk the deserted streets two blocks to the Cathedral and sit on a bench outside, admiring the structure, the tan stone, and Romanesque design.  Thee is a statue of St. Francis and the animals in front of the Cathedral, and a bird bath at the side, with an inscription from Aquinas saying birds are the most noble living things, clad in beautiful feathers, singing beautifully, and domiciled in the pure air.  On a wall next to the chapel, is a plaster cast of St. Francis, in white, lit by lights, just as the Cathedral facade is, leaving St. Francis’ prayer illuminated in the night: “may I be an instrument of your peace, sowing love, giving pardon, having faith, spreading light and joy.  I will not seek to be consoled as to console, to be loved as to love, to be understood as to understand.  For, it is in giving that we receive, in pardoning that we are pardoned, and in dying that we are born into eternal life.” The last clause is one of the more comforting things I have read about death, along with the Twenty Third Psalm, the Christian Science Scientific Statement of Being, and Anne Morrow Lindberg’s statement about being apart from life but part of it, in The Steep Ascent.   After sitting there, taking this in for a while, I walk back via Alameda Street, turning and paralleling the small canal and park which runs next to Paseo de Peralta street, backtracking to my motel.  On the way, I pass the Alameda Street bridge crossing to Canyon Road, the bridge where Klaus Fuchs passed the atomic bomb drawings to the Russians in 1945, while working at Los Alamos.  The things you can learn and see through travel.

The next morning I am on the road, seeing what may be the best part of New Mexico, the road north from Santa Fe to Taos, passing the Santa Fe Opera, and the villages of Pojaque and Arroyo Seco, branching off to the east through Nambe Pueblo to Chimayo, then onto the high back road to Taos that runs atop the pinon covered hills and mountains of the Sangre de Cristo foothills of the Rockies, pink soil amid the pinon trees, and with silver, billowing clouds above, and small casitas along the roads.  This is a magical high elevation vista: the sky lavender, the landscape coral and rust.  All the colors blend into a Hispanic and native American paradise, with buttes and bluffs in the near distance, and purple mountains far ahead behind Taos to the north.  I pass Ranchos de Chimayo, one of the best restaurants in the state, with tables on the vast lawn, the Hacienda Inn across the narrow road, and a few scattered adobe and territorial style houses, the latter with tin roofs.  There are state signs saying that certain native American villages are off limits.  At one point, I pass  over a washed out section of road.  I find myself driving along the high road above Lake Santa Cruz, on narrow winding roads lined with cottonwoods, and amid small unnamed towns which the road creeps and winds through, like in Spain.  I have to admit that I enjoy retirement now.

At one point, I  backtrack from the high road, winding back down to Espinola on the main highway.  Espinola is becoming Santa Fe’s north valley.  There are a lot of REMAX and Coldwell-Banker sings around.  But, it is still a lot of what New Mexico used to be, not yet a Santa Fe or Taos.  I pull into Blake’s Lotta Burger, a New Mexico drive in franchise, with burgers cooked on the grill.   There is a good feeling here.  It is a local hangout, with businessmen popping in for lunch.  A lot of cars are parked in the dirt lot, with customers waiting for the loud speaker to call their numbers.  Inside the drive in, elderly women are working the two windows, taking orders.  People in line are friendly with each other.  There is no hurry.  Everyone is nice.  Pigeons are everywhere in the lot.   After lunch, I am back on the highway to Taos, following the Rio Grande river the last ten miles, watching rafters in orange life vests aboard gray ten-person rafts running with the current, granite cliff walls in the background.   Emerging near Taos, on the Taos plateau, I can see miles of flat grassland, divided only by a narrow and deep  trench–the Rio Grande river gorge– winding is way northwest.

Getting into Taos, itself, I run into tall pine, rather than the stubbier pinon.  I drive through town on the single two lane street, passing Kit Carson city park, and continuing on north of town, to the outskirts, to Taos Pueblo, which I discover is about to close, at 5 p.m.   I backtrack along the main street, past the Taos Inn and Fechin House, on to the Quality Inn, a Desert Inn type motel of  the 1960s, low and spreading, built of sandy colored tan brick, and glass sliding doors, with a large pool and Elm trees covering the back lawn.  After checking in, I go out by the pool and sit on some metal chairs on the grass, under a metal awning in the light rain.  The mountains seem close.  I am reading A Moveable Feast by Hemingway, his 1920s Paris memoirs, preparing for my class in Helena.  The book transforms me back into Paris of the 1920s, just like the first time I read it as an undergraduate: the Left Bank cafes, Luxembourg Gardens, Cafe des Lillas, Deux Magots.  The air has a  fresh, pine smell in the rain.  There are some gray clouds directly above, and a high mountain in visible to the north, the Taos Ski Basin.  At 7,000 feet, I notice that Taos is cooler than Santa Fe.   The Taos light is gradually changing.  There are now clear blue openings in the clouds and more sunshine, which is diffused through the Elm trees giving me shade.

I go back up to the room to plan tomorrow’s gallery itinerary, then drive out to the downtown Plaza area to reconnoiter the route to the Harwood Gallery. In the distance, beyond the nearby pine trees, I can see pink adobe condos.  I remember to say a prayer for a brown dog I saw when driving through Espinola.  It was in the back of an old pickup, and was just skin and bones, its ribs outlined.  I pray it will be provided for and know love.  Seeing the Ernest Blumenschein museum is still open for half an hour, I park in the downpour on the narrow street in front, waiting till the rain subsides for a minute, then dodge the rain drops to run inside.  The museum is Blumenschein’s adobe house, and is typical of the vernacular, with lots of built on rooms, curved archways, wooden “niches,” “viga” cross beam timbers under the ceiling, and thick adobe walls throughout.  Sitting on an easel in the artists’s studio is his original painting, “Ranchos de Taos Church,” with gold tones and large brush strokes.  His “Mountains in Arizona,” on the dining room wall, has lots of reds, from his later period.  “The Portal” has vivid colors.  There is a Leon Gaspard painting on the living room wall, with its more post-impressionistic, abstract New Mexico scene.  I chat with the ladies who run the museum, and buy a small print of Walter Ufer’s “Where the Mountains Meet the Desert,” now in my Helena study, with its distinctive bluish mountains, tan arroyos, and predominant medium greens, then go back to the motel to have dinner in the dining room, looking out at the pool.

I return to my room, which has a small writing desk next to the window, and jot down notes on the Blumenschein Gallery, calling my wife and leaving a message, then scanning the television for baseball game.  As it gets dark, I do my Taos routine, driving south outside of town, then turning left off the highway, just beyond the city limits, continuing up a hill past a new hospital, past the new housing developments of  Ranchos de Taos, and finally turning on to an empty side road.  I switch off the headlights, cut the engine, and get out,  enjoying the evening as it turns into night, the bright stars close above in the foothills, the air cool and light.  Taos, a small town still, remains old New Mexico, like the Ansel Adams “moonrise” photo of Hernandez, 1943.  It is now totally dark except for the stars and a few lights sparkling in the distance, coming from small adobe houses and farms scattered over the plateau landscape below.  The smell of pine and pinon is stronger.  It is a night I won’t forget, like the one in Las Cruces, standing in Veterans Park, with orange and turquoise streaks in the sky to the west, or in Santa Barbara, on East Beach, with white lights of sailboats bobbing in the dark waters.  In all three cases, the beauty of the world is inspiring.  It is hard to pull myself away and go back to the room.  Three evenings to remember: desert, ocean, and mountains.   Life is a smorgasbord: the Taos night, Santa Fe Plaza in the evening, good tacos, Blumenschein’s art, even Lotta Burger in Espinola.

Finally, alone, crunching footsteps on gravel, I walk back to the car and turn on the engine.  The instrument panel lights up red in the night.  I go back to the motel, and lay out my clothes for the next day, a long sleeve maroon knit shirt, Wrangler jeans, black belt with my new Hopi buckle, and cordovan penny loafers, the same Bass Weejuns I have been wearing since 1965.  I read some Hemingway from A Moveable Feast, the chapter about a good cafe on the Place St. Michel, about Hemingway, the young man, writing about writing and about a girl he sees there.  “You’re mine forever, beauty,” he tells himself as he writes of her in his moleskin notebook using sharpened pencil.  I turn off the light, say a prayer, think about the White Sox lineup, my usual sheep, as I drift off.  I am like Jake Barnes in Hendaye, on the Spanish-French coast, in The Sun Also Rises.  Or, trying to be like Jake, enjoying the small things, folding his comb into his towel, laying out his clothes, and going into the ocean for a swim before retiring.  What a life, Hemingway had.

I awake in the morning about 8:30, take a long, hot shower to fully wake up, dress, and go downstairs to the dining room for breakfast, two eggs over easy, hash browns, two strips of bacon, and whole wheat toast with black coffee.  It came with the room.  Outside, there is a cloudless white sky telling me it is going to be hot.  I am the first to get into the Fechin House, known as the Taos Art Museum, the only person there when they open the doors. I take my time, strolling from room to room, admiring Fechin’s early Russian phase, his paintings of women, reminding me of Repin, his tutor, and of the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.  Fechin’s style, however, is more abstract than Repin and Serov’s.  Fechin used wonderful red colors on his Taos portraits.  His “Manicured Lady,” in the dining room, is gray and impressionistic.  You can see see the knife scrapes on the canvas.  I also notice two very good Bert Reynolds paintings, “The Buffalo Hunter’s Son,” of a native American, plus “War Bonnet Shadows.”  Phillips was one of the founders of the Taos Art Colony.  There are also Martin Hennings, “Sunlit Foothills,” in green and tan, of pinon trees  and green mountains, and “Thinning Aspens.”  I have a large Hennnings’ poster on my bedroom wall in Helena.  Oscar Berningshaus’ “Crossing the Arroyo” is remarkable for its soft tones and hazy atmosphere, with just one bright color, of a gold saddle blanket.  Walter Ufer’s  “In a Pea Field” and “Kit Carson’s House” are my overall favorites.  The Fechin House, itself, now the museum, is impressive, a mixture of Russian and Hispanic decoration, with wood carvings, wrought iron, tiled bathrooms, and bulky wooden furniture, but with “international style” smooth white stucco exterior, cubist, and with square black metal window frames reminiscent of the Bauhaus.   From the Fechin House, I swing by the Harwood Museum, near the Plaza, where my favorites are E.I. Crouse’s firelight figures and his silver plate photographs, and J.H. Sharp’s “Body in a Teeepee,” of a native American asleep, rolled in a hammock, impressionistic and gray.

As I leave for Montana, I realize I missed a few of my regular haunts this visit.  In Santa Fe, I didn’t have breakfast at Tia Sophia’s, or blue corn enchiladas at the Shed, or visit Museum Hill and St. John’s College, or take in the Geogia O’Keefe Museum.  In Taos, I missed the Taos Inn and Taos Pueblo, the later so interesting with its famous church an communal style dwellings.  But, I have a lot to look forward on the road back: Four Corners and Moab, and Salt Lake City.  Life is indeed a smorgasbord, a  lesson  I learned from that great romantic and traveler, my Uncle Bob.   His spirit is suggesting I go back the long way through Phoenix, just so I can have bagels and lox at “Cocos.” (2009)

Oklahoma is a touch of the Midwest, with green rolling hills, grasslands, and humid climate, and a touch of the Southwest, with the cowboy culture, oil, and warmer climate.  I like the western flavor, but with a bit cooler climate and more greenery added.  It straddles both regions, southwest and midwest, like the Big 12 Conference, which has Iowa State to the north and Texas to the south.  There is a comfortableness about Oklahoma.  The people have carved out a nice, separate lifestyle for Oklahomans, with nice housing and low cost of living.  There is a calmness about the world, a provincial feel.  Weather is a part of your life.  You are close to it in Oklahoma.  Balmy skies and thunder storms.  Mostly, that is a nice feeling.  However, Oklahoma is also about tornado alerts and warnings breaking into television programs.  It is driving along the highways, listening to the radio to know where funnels are touching down, which counties.

I am driving east from Denver, towards Salina, Kansas, where I will turn south towards Oklahoma.  Once again, I am on the open Interstate.   Although America has been homogenized by the Walmarts, Exxons, and McDonalds, you can still find beauty and solace on the Interstate, in the scenery you drive through, as on autopilot.  You can get off the Interstates and take back roads if you wish.  There is still something to the open road.  Perhaps I am not really going anywhere, just going.  Perhaps there is a lostness in me which I disguise by creating artificial destinations.  Perhaps I have wanderlust genes, going back to my Dad, who moved the family every year from town to town, doing sales, or perhaps further back to my family which left Holland in 1848.  One of my film heroes is Kowalski, who races from Denver to San Francisco in his Dodge Challenger, chased by police all the way, in “Vanishing Point.”  I am clearly enchanted by travel, the freedom of the open road, the wide spaces, the movement, the exploration of the country, new discoveries.  I envy the motorcyclists, caught in the rain, putting on wet gear beneath underpasses, riding the roads in open weather, with no canopy around them, the air in their faces, their oneness with nature.  They really experience the countryside they travel through.

I am in somewhere in western Kansas, flat and plain.  As a child, the great plains of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas were my life: Dodge City, Great Bend, Garden City, Duncan, Amarillo, and Levelland.  The towns talked about and traveled through, where Dad trained salesmen: McPherson, Pratt, Hutchinson, El Dorado, Hays, Newton, Meade, and Liberal.  Places on the Kansas Turnpike (KTA), others on the Will Rogers Turnpike, where we overnighted on the way between Roswell and Des Moines.   My thoughts go to my Uncle who was my Dad’s boss, who opened memorial parks, and who helped “all boats rise” in the family.  I remember the kitchen tables, with the old timer salesmen  sitting around it talking about  “big deals,” and the young salesmen, students at O.U.  Stories are being told of other old salesmen, one last seen driving, oblivious, down a one way street the wrong way in Hobbs, New Mexico, yelling at an oncoming car to get off the blinking road.  Each year for me was a new school in a new town.  I don’t remember much of it.

The fields I am passing now are wheat fields, golden, with farm houses in the distance, modest with modest barns, always white board.  Signs on the road point to Abilene, Ike’s birthplace, and to Russell, home to Bob Dole and Arlen Specter.  Turning south at Salina, I travel a while entering Oklahoma, then exit in the evening to Blackwell, Oklahoma.  I am looking for memories of my childhood.  We lived here for a summer after my 6th grade.  I remember my mother, my younger sister, and I walking each day to the public swimming pool, new and clean, crowded with families.  But, as I drive through town with my window down, I am taken back by the fact that many buildings are empty, with only a few older people sitting on main street, the city pool in disrepair, long closed.  Has this happened in the past 50 years, or was my memory wrong?  I got back on the freeway.

In Norman, I have lunch at Taco Bueno, one of my favorite fast food places, and drive over to Fred Jones Gallery on the University of Oklahoma campus, where I see a wonderful exhibit of Edward Curtis late period (1926) photographs of the Oklahoma plains tribes, the Cherokee, Cheyenne, Pawnee, Osage, Wichita, and Arapaho.  Curtis retired in 1930, but lived until 1952, suffering depression and not working, the exhibit said.  His gold toned, silver plate photographs show native Americans who still lived in the old world, even in the 1920s.   We see a traditional world, apart from modernization, except for some cowboy clothes.  It is a world of traditional societies, “sky” and “deer,” and bundled babies in wooden child carriers, and buffalo herds, and dancers, and teepees, and pumpkin carving to make bowls, and lot of native dress.  My favorite item in the museum is the painting of “Vanessa Bell,”  done in 1912, by fellow Bloomsbury Group member Duncan Grant.  The Bloomsbury is a new discovery for me.   The painting is post impressionistic, of Vanessa sitting in a chair and reading.  It consists of broad strokes in brown, purple, and green.  The colors are those of colored chalk.   Another favorite item is a painting entitled “Prune Trees in Belgium,” done in 1998 by another new discovery for me, Brad Aldridge.  Other favorites include Rousseau’s “Stark Street in the Suburbs,” of black, white, and gray geometric buildings, not his usual animal and nature themes.  There is a beautiful still life, “Study of Roses,”  by Julian Alden Weir, a wonderful watercolor, with clear glass vase to die for.  Raoul Dufy, the Fauvist, was represented by his “Beach in France,” in violet and aquamarine pastels, swirling colors.  Finally a ceramic Tan Dynasty (907-618 BCE) Chinese horse, painted gold.  There are some good Vuillard, Hassam, and Bonnards, and Taos painters Conger Irving Crouse and Leon Gaspard.  Walking out of the museum, I walk over to my car parked on the oval nearby, and start the engine, pausing a moment to remember a girl who studied art here a long time ago, when I was a student at Texas Tech.  I slowly drive away.

After Norman, I drive to Oklahoma City, to a downtown area near “Brick Town.”  I have a great steak at the stockyards before going to the Oklahoma City Art Museum.   There, i find  some good works, including Taos painters: Robert Henri’s “Tesuque Buck”  of a young native American, mainly in reds, showing the subject’s inner calm, nobility, and dignity; a Georgia O’Keefe, “Yellow Lilly,” of a light green flower with yellow bloom, very fine; John Sloan’s two black crows amid a palette of blue sky over a village; and Ernst Blumenschein’s “New Mexico,” 1922, expressionistic, in reds and tans, of a pueblo.   The museum also has American Impressionist William Merritt Chase’s “Venice” (1877) of an arch-windowed palazzo, which seems to show Whistler’s influence.  Other notable paintings includ Eugene Boudin’s “Portreaux Harbor, Brittany,” (1873) with white and blue boats in the harbor; Renoir’s “Girl in the Woods” blending the girl and garden with thick orange and gren strokes, almost post impressionistic in its vagueness; and the Fauvist, Maurice de Vlamminch, using typical Flemish dark greens and blues, creating an image of a “Village” using bold strokes and colors.   The gallery also has a nice collection of Hugenot-influenced, English 17th and 18th Century silverware, a silver mounted flintlock pistol, plus some modern art: Chihuli glass in sea shapes with translucent whites and carbon lip wraps; a Harry Bertoia sound structure, using copper rods; a John Henry Jasper large aluminum structure, painted orange and red, like a Calder, but on the ground; and a Harry Kramer wire cage with Rube Goldberg device inside which you set into motion by pressing a button.

From Oklahoma City, I drive to Bartlesville, about forty miles from Tulsa, a company town and financial center for Phillips Petroleum and its pipeline subsidiary under Harold Price.  It is a nice small town with some very interesting architecture, in particular Frank Lloyd Wright’s Price Tower, 19 stories tall, made of concrete and lots of glass, with copper trim, and with each floor cantilevered off a central core.   This is Wright’s only skyscraper, originally designed in 1929 for New York, but finally built in 1952, standing alone on the rolling prairie.  Wright, with his usual genius, called it “a tree escaped the (skyscraper) forest.”  The great thing is that Price Tower is a hotel, one of the few Wright buildings you can actually stay in.  My wife and I stayed there once.  It was beautiful inside as well, very 1950ish, with pastel colors, and rooms built on a diamond module, everything angular inside, and steel framed windows which open outward.  Our room was chartreuse, and the furniture pine.  On that night, It was stormy outside, and there was the possibility of tornadoes.   High winds whistled around the tower, and rolling thunder passed over us that night, growling and rumbling, low, close above.  It is my favorite hotel anywhere.  In addition to Price Tower, there is a Clifford May ranch house in Bartlesville, built for the Phillips family, plus eight or nine Bruce Goff houses, and a civic center designed by Wright’s son-in-law Wesley Peters, which resembles Wright’s Grady Gammage Auditorium in Phoenix.  There are also a number of beautiful WPA style masonry buildings built in the 1930s.

The Philbrook Museum

From Bartlesville, it is an easy jump to Tulsa, where, in one day, I visit Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1929 concrete and glass home for his cousin, s modernist masterpiece named “Westhope,” drive by the Art Deco Boston Street United Methodist Church, and end up at the Philbrook Museum of Art, located on Waite and Genevieve Phillips’ estate with Italianate mansion and 70 acres of gardens.  Waite was the younger brother of Franklin Phillips, and he and his wife collected only the finest works of art from a wide range of interests: Roman, Egyptian, Italian Renaissance, Impressionist, 19th Century French, African, native American, etc.  Walking through the quiet Italianate mansion is like walking though a Tuscan villa, with views  from the windows of Renaissance pools, trellises, and statuary on the grounds.  As I left, I tell the curator that this is one of the finest collections I have ever been to.  I am not being generous.  It joins the Freer, Chicago Art Institute, and Seattle Art Museum, among my favorite galleries anywhere.

Among my favorite works at the Philbrook are first, Raoul Dufy’s “View of Nice” (1927), with its broad expanse of light blue and aquamarine water, the Cote d’Azure, covering the canvas, and coral-and white coastal town crammed at the edge of the bay, on the right edge of the canvas.  Two palm trees stand up in front in a painting which is all curves.  This painting, which joins my “very favorites list,” I read, is from Duffy’s late period, when one color would dominate the surface in a single area.  It reminds me of the Duffy at the Fred Jones, with a curving bay, but in that case, a bit more variety, not all water.  Another favorite at the Philbrook is John Singleton Copley’s “Portrait of a Lady,” 1771,  with such great clarity of the lit face, the oil on canvas so clear and pure.  Then I come upon another painting to go on my top list:  a spectacular Corot, “Pleasures of the Evening,” a large canvas, almost a  center piece for the Museum, it is pre-impressionistic, like Millet, displaying a sunset in the country.  A rather dark canvas, in browns, the description says it is from Corot’s late, gauzy, period, evoking mood more than subject.  It is very elegant and moving, like Millet’s gleaners and harvesters in the evening.   Next in order cames four beautiful still lifes: George Braque’s painting of black flowers in a black pot; Julian Alden Weir’s roses in crystal, reminding me again of the Fred Jones Weir still life; William Hannett’s “Still Life and Music Items” 1885, very austere and New England; and Picasso’s “Less Pommes,” blue potatoes, great quality.   Other favorites this day include Andrew Wyeth’s charcoal colored painting of three large millstones on a New England farm; Vuillard’s “post-impressionistic “Madame des Jardins-Fontaine, of the lady in her sitting room, done in browns rather than the usual Vuillard maroons and dark blues, a touch of his Japanese influence, without use of kimonos; and Childe Hassam’s “The Surf,” in blues with broad brush strokes, of the tide coming in.  There is a nice collection of Taos painters: Nicoli Fechin’s “Albedia,” between realistic and expressionistic, of a native American woman wearing a white robe made up of white squares; Robert Henri’s “Mary Patton” (1927) in reds, simplified but with the sitters’ character coming through, Leon Gaspard’s “1918 Taos,” with adobe shapes and colors dominating, and others by Bert Phillips, Ken Miller Adams, and Oscar Berninghaus, the latter of a native American couple in a Northern New Mexico village.

The Philbrook has the best collection I’ve seen of Pueblo indian jewelry, especially the Santo Domingo and Zia silver, turquoise, and coral; a wonderful Egyptian bas relief of the god, Amun Ra, on white slate; a beautiful wood and enamel Egyptian middle dynasty falcon; and African works from the best artistic groups in Africa, including masks and musical instruments. These include the Dogon (Mali)  carved wood “Chirousos,” or antelopes, with horns sweeping  back over the body, a triangular arrangement; a  rather small Guro (Ivory Coast) elephant mask with white ivory tusks; a Sinufo (Mali) “Bird Standard”  consisting of two black birds, like crows, with wings extended and connected at the tips; a white Dogon elongated antelope mask; a white Gabon mask;  An Ashanti (Ghana) fertility goddess and large kettle shaped drum with carved cornice around the exterior  brim; a Dan (Liberia) finger harp with metal strips; and a Mali harp with one string.  The Philbrook also had for sale beautiful Robert Held vases , blue glass and hand painted flowers; a good collection of Italian Quatrocentro religious paintings, one by a Mategna Follower, of “Madonna and Child,” lighter colors than usual, with beautiful, clear female features, dated 1431; and wonderful sculptures by Giaocometti, a bronze statue entitled “Annette VI” ( 1962), in rough metal state, thin and elegant, and by Archipenko, “Standing Concave,” (1925) a symbolized standing female in bronze.

The Gilcrease Museum

The following day, I visit another wonderful art museum in Tulsa, “The Gilcrease,” dedicated to the American West.  The Museum is located on the western outskirts of town, a beautiful landscape.  I visited in the pouring rain.  The Museum is elegant, quiet and refined, the staff is very personable, and there is a wonderful attached restaurant overlooking the grounds.  I love the native American artifacts, especially the beaded clothing, such as a black beaded skirt of the Ka Poltawotamie, dated 1900, with blue patterns on it, the best individual piece I’ve seen anywhere, including the Denver Art Museum.  Also, a Cheyenne buckskin shirt, with blue strips of attached cloth running down the chest from over the shoulders, and a Cheyenne blue beaded large occasional bag, dated 1890.  Finally, there is a Brule Sioux beaded long dress, medium blue, dyed buckskin and a smaller Sioux beaded short dress, lighter blue, looking more like a man’s shirt.  In addition to crafts, the gallery has some fine native American artists (all new discoveries for me) like Virginia Stroud’s “Ledger of Indians Stealing Military Horses,” done on ledger paper with drawings of angular shaped horses; Walter Tutsi Wai Bigbee’s contemporary black and white photographs of native American life and lands, of tee-pees and animals as they were; and Cherokee Renaissance artist Jeanne Rorex Bridges’ water colors done on board of Choctaw stories from Mississippi and Florida before the “Trail of Tears,” one a haunting piece entitled “Journey to Freedom” showing moonlight nights with African Americans clad in white sheets crossing a river, escaping slavery in the night.

There are other excellent paintings and sculpture by renown artists.  Foremost are four George Catlin oil paintings, panoramas, of beautiful landscapes from a distance, first of buffalo herds on the salt meadows of the Upper Missouri river, then snowy white fields with buffalo, and a pale green landscape and prairie dog villages on rolling hills that look Oklahoma, and finally, all in tans, “Catching the Wild Horse,” in hill country.  These are simple paintings, almost with a touch of Rousseau or Thomas Hart Benton,  giving a real insight into prairie life.  For me, they are even better than his famous reddish portraits on board of native American chiefs hanging in the Renwick Gallery in D.C.  There is also a George de Forest Brush, “Crossing the Prairie,” 1888, showing a native American on horseback at the riverbank, a winter scene with snow covered sage, memorable.  The Gilcrease had a special exhibit on display when I visited called “The Road to Freedom,” depicting the U.S. march through history, and including a 19th Century embroidered waistcoat (vest), a St. Gaudens sculpture in bronze, “The Puritan,” with cape bellowing out in the wind behind the figure, and a painting of the “Battle of Buena Vista,” in the Mexican War, showing Zachary Taylor’s vastly outnumbered troops holding off a mass charge of Mexican Army regulars.  The caption said Taylor was lucky, the Mexican force ran out of ammunition, but that Taylor was cool in battle, telling a messenger only he would decide if things were going badly or not.  There was also a painting of Winfield Scott’s troops at the Mexican War Battle of Moliano del Rey.   The museum also has a number of Frederick Remington paintings on permanent display: “The Stampede” 1908, in blue, a night scene, of a man on horseback watching his cattle, illuminated by a yellow, jagged lighting flash; “The Escort” of a cavalry officer in dress uniform with his girl friend riding together near the fort; “The Bell Mare” of a white horse leading a file of men on a mountain trail; “Coming and Going of the Pony Express,” 1900, with the wonderful Remington yellows; and “Missing,” 1899, of a captive blue coated cavalry man being led between two files of native American fighters.   The Pony Express and Escort pieces were comparable to the Remingtons at the Carter Gallery in Ft. Worth, with large yellow scenes and light blue skies.   You can almost taste the desert dust in these.  With distance, I remember “The Escort” and “Missing” best, due perhaps to the subject matter.

I leave Oklahoma with a bit of regret.  I will probably make it back as far as Western Kansas tonight, maybe even jog over to Great Bend, to my 3rd Grade town.  Maybe I’ll capture some memories on the way home. (2009)

The High Line

I am riding Amtrak’s “Empire Builder from Montana to Chicago,” listening on my headphones to “Bob’s Song” from the “Assassination of Jesse James” movie soundtrack, its sharp high piano keys drowned out by heavy, melancholy violin chords, the bow scraping slowly over the strings, evoking frontier America.  It seems so appropriate to the setting.  Looking out the club car window, I can see mist and rain, and low clouds.  When the rain lets up, stretched before me is a palette of medium blue skies over gently rolling medium green fields.  No trees.  We are on the “High Line,” the northern area of Montana, near the Canadian border, isolated, paralleling the two laned Highway 2 with the occasional pick ups and sedans trudging along, their amber headlights on at 3 p.m..  It is June, but cool.   We are speeding through beautiful, empty country.

As we approach North Dakota, the land acquires more definition, has more mounds and ravines, more rivers with short trees lining them.  The clouds are whiter and more stretched out; the sky is lighter blue, thinner.  Soon we are passing through flooded landscape.  Later, we pass into Minnesota, which is more Mid-Western, with its Holstein dairy cattle, evergreens and clover, and elegant two lane asphalt roads and Volvo station wagons going off into the country over gently rolling lands.  It could be Sweden.  We pass occasional farm houses, white with enclosed porches, creating a certain aesthetic.  Minnesota, like Utah and Wisconsin, gives the impression of a state where everything has been done well, where all has been well planned and crafted.   There are yellow fields near Little Falls, and ahead in the distance, towards the northern horizon, I can see a silver slice of sky beneath dark, low clouds, giving the impression of a wide, shining river.  It is but a slice of low sky, illuminated, as night pours in and evening disappears.  Later, we are paralleling the Mississippi River.

I feel like a zephyr in the night.  The coach is dark, the lights off, and I lie with my head against the window, which is spotted by raindrops.  The window pane acts as a mirror, reflecting the interior of the car–gray leather seats, overhead reading lights, and blue floor lights–  all mixing with the outside world as I look though the window.  It is as if I am sitting outside the train on the gray seat, moving along fast, meeting oncoming cars on a frontage road next to the tracks.  There are distant red lights outside atop radio towers in the cobalt night, and we speed past dark patches, which are woods, broken by an occasional yellow house light emerging between the black patches.  There is the solid backdrop of dark trees and dark gray Minnesota night sky, then a few individual houses with single porch lights, then another black patch of trees, then, as if a miracle, a small town emerges, carved out of the forest with streets and cars going all directions, and empty parking lots with black asphalt surfaces wet from rain, lamp poles spaced evenly.  These are towns which have mainly gone to sleep, families snug in their unlit northern houses.  As we move along the tracks, the lights of the village fade behind, leaving a necklace of white dots spread through the night in the distance.  The horn blows a quick farewell.  The small town was a miracle, symbolizing life, saying you are not alone in the night.  People and nature can exist together as in the stone age.  All is as it should be.  Ahead, in the distance lie the high buildings of St. Paul, the elegant city of Sinclair Lewis, Scott Fitzgerald, Cass Gilbert, Elmslie and Purcell, and Summit Avenue.

I am left with an appreciation of the north, Minnesota to Montana, beautiful lands, nostaligic under balmy skies with heavy, moist air, lush and green with cool blue evenings, wild birds, lakes, rivers, and nature, empty space, small farm towns, red brick buildings, blond girls straight out of Scott Fitzgerald standing at the railroad crossing in Fargo, men wearing light jackets on June evenings, white wood-framed houses with porches and gardens, plus the feeling of  being north.   The passengers on the train add to the aura:  Montana and Dakota small town people, sons and daughters of Scandinavian immigrants like my Uncle, strong people who survive in a tough area.

Chicago

I enjoy my first morning in Chicago, walking the downtown streets between Union Station and the Art Institute, and riding the “El,” the elevated subway, over the streets and between great early modernist buildings like Daniel Burnham’s steel framed Reliance Building and Louis Sullivan’s Carson Pirie Scott and Auditorium buildings.  The second morning, I take the Red Line to the suburb of Oak Park, a combination of Prairie architecture, gilded age Victorians, and bungaloes.   I walk to the World War I memorial, a bronze statue of a “Doughboy” with Springfield rifle, long bayonet, leggings, and British tin saucer helmet.  The base includesa list of boys from Oak Park who fell in the Great War, reminding me that given the number years involved, World War I was costlier than World War II.  I walk on to the Hemingway Museum, formerly a Christian Science church, which is a bit run down but has great content.  The museum divides Hemingway’s life into phases, early Michigan, 1920s Paris, 1930s Key West, 1940s Cuba, 1950s Idaho, etc.  There are, glass panels hanging from the ceiling, with passages from his novels etched on them.  From Islands in the Stream aboard the Pilar: “he was happy again to be on the flying bridge…”  From For Whom The Bell Tolls, Robert Jordan telling Maria she can’t stay with him to block the fascist patrol when he is gravely wounded: “Nay Rabbit, listen…”  From A Farewell to Arms, the hospital scene with Catherine in the Swiss hospital where she is in labor: “she can not die, but what if she does.”  And, the last paragraphs from “Snows of Kilimanjaro,” where the white hunter with gangrene is in the plane going to Nairobi, and looks out at the peak of Kilimanjaro, and knows that is where he is really going.  He won’t make it to Nairobi.  There is also a wonderful film documentary of Hemingway’s life, with interviews of dos Passos, Hadley, Pauline, and even Agnes von Kurowski, his nurse/love in Milan in World War I.  You can’t get the film anywhere else.  It was grandfathered in over objections of Hemingway’s family.  The bookstore sells photos of Hem with his favorite cat, Boise, one of which now sits in my study.  Glass cases in the museum contain his original typed manuscripts, edited in pencil.  He didn’t need to do a lot of editing, despite what he said.

From the Hemingway Museum, I make my way afoot on my own Frank Lloyd Wright tour.  I pass street after street of beautiful Victorian Queen Annes with carved filagree, towers, bay windows, and wrap around porches.  I finally begin my Wright tour with Unity Temple, on the corner of Kenilworth and Lake, built in 1905.   Modernist and the first major building made of concrete, it stands clearly apart from the nearby Victorians.  What a statement it must have made in the era of horse and buggy, being geometric, cubist, and unpainted, a church no less.   Plain on the outside,  just a few carvings on the concrete walls for decoration.  Derided at the time as a “Mayan Handball Court,”  it, nonetheless, had great effect on the European modernists, Oud, Mies, LeCorbusier, and Gropius.  Inside, it is a typical Wright jewel, with Arts and Crafts designs, colors of nature, a coffered ceiling which lets light in, plus amber and green clerestory windows high up, everything geometrically connected, combining art and craft.

Leaving Unity Temple, I walk down Lake and take a right onto Forest Avenue, encountering the first Wright “Prairie House,” the 1901 Frank Thomas House, known as “the Harem,” low and horizontal, with hipped roof, Sullivanesque arched doorway, and smooth stucco finish.  Its green wooden trim and  banks of art glass windows run the length of the house and separate the levels.  I stand there on the street admiring it, knowing its significance and that it is still being lived in.  A couple of blocks further down Forest, and I take right turn on a cul de sac, Elizabeth Court, to see the 1904 Laura Gale House, a bit smaller and with squares rather than rectangles thrown together in a more complex pattern than with other Prairie Houses, and with cantilevered balconies extending out, the model for the larger “Fallingwater” to come years later.  Just beyond, on Forest, is Wright’s house and studio, and museum.  I backtrack two houses to my favorite Prairie house, the 1902 Heurtley House, made of alternating horizontal layers of contrasting bricks, which blend together at a distance, giving the house a rusty sandstone quality.  It, too, has the Sullivan arched brick door, which Wright would later abandon, and the usual bands of stained art glass windows, low pitched roofs, and concrete capings.  I have been inside, on a Wright Plus tour, but it is the outside which I love the most.  Next, I turn left onto Chicago Avenue for deep dish pizza, then back onto Kenilworth going past Hemingway’s boyhood home, where he lived from age 7 to 18, when he left home to become a reporter in Kansas City.  On East Avenue, I stop to view  the 1901 Fricke and 1903 William Martin houses, tan and white stucco, respectively, with wood trim, a combination of intersecting, sliding horizontal planes, with a few vertical planes thrown in, and with wooden mullioned banks of art glass windows.  I finish with the 1902 square patterned, brick, almost hidden, Cheney House.  I  then take a taxi to the neighboring suburb, River Forest, to see the prototype of the Prairie House, the 1893 William Winslow House, a beautiful golden brick jewel, with stone facade surrounding the front door and stone bands surrounding the windows, and with a brown terra cotta band with floral shapes for the entire second story above the brick, underneath a tall, overhanging, hipped roof.  How appropriate that Warren Winslow should have such a dream house, since he was Wright’s collaborator, constructing iron gratings and other artistic items designed for Wright.

The following day, I take the El downtown to the Art Institute of Chicago Museum, taking my time, going slowly through the halls.  I particularly enjoy the artifacts from Chicago architecture of the late 1800s, the iron work screens and elevator doors with cast iron foliage patterns from Louis Sullivan’s buildings, plus Sullivan’s Arch preserved in the courtyard.  I enjoy seeing the craft of Wright’s assistants:  Marion Mahoney’s art glass windows, Ionelli’s angular sculptures of spirits, or “sprites,” reminiscent of Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” characters, Elmslie and Purcell’s wooden furniture, horizontal in design and of light polished oak.  I drift into the Asian Collection, and am overwhelmed by the Chinese works, the blue undercoated Ming porcelain, the thin jade burial ovals, and the Buddhist stone votive, of gray marble, twelve feet long, eight feet high, and two feet in width, with stories carved onto it in rows, Egyptian style, dated about 551 A.D., the highlight of the Art Institute for me.  There is the T.T. Tsoi Gallery of Ming dynasty silk screens, with their drawings of brightly colored birds, leaves, and people dressed in long purple robes.  Such screens were used outdoors by the gentry to block the wind, the exhibit says.

I make a few new personal discoveries.  These include Richard Berthe’s sculpture, particularly his glossy black bronze work entitled “The Boxer,” thin and elongated, dated 1942.  The second is George Hitchcock, who did a painting called “The Annunciation,” 1887, of a girl in a field of lillies.  It had a pre-Raphaelite quality, even with a thin halo above the girl’s head.  He also did a painting of a Dutch girl on a canal, with cream and cheese pots balanced over her shoulders.  He was one of those American artists who benefitted from post Civil War prosperity and traveled for inspiration, living most of his life in Amsterdam.   The classical Dutch period (1600-50) painter, Jan van Goyen, was another discovery for me.  He did a beautiful seascape, “Fishing Boats off an Estuary” with low horizon, monochromatic palette showing smoke, a tan sail, birds, and sky and sea almost blurred in their grayness.  Saw a Thomas Wilmer Dewing, who I had encountered before, “Lady in Green and Gray,” 1911, again monochromatic.

Among my favorites in the Museum were Gustave Caillebote’s “Paris in the Rain,” 1877, the centerpiece of the Impressionist gallery, and Rembrandt’s “Man with a Golden Chain,” 1631, the finest Rembrandt I have seen anywhere, with his craggy partially illuminated face, black gown, gray neck armor and gold necklace, and dignified background going from light to dark gray.  In the same area was a Rembrandt School painting of a young Dutch country girl with brown dress and red necklace standing behind an open half door.  The inscription says of the painting: “otherwise the same as Rembrandt, but lacks the grandeur.” That is how they determined it was not done by Rembrandt, but one of his Leiden students.  Next in my order of favorites was Alfred Sisley’s “View of the Seine,” with sand hills in the background and light blue river; Renoir’s “Two Sisters,” with the same sisters, one a child, in Manet’s “Gare St. Lazare,” (with puppy) that I have always loved; Monet’s “Women on the Seine,” with Camille and her baby in a basinette, her in broad striped blue and white dress and with buildings across the river reflected on the surface; Berthe Morrisot’s “Woman at her Toilette,” seated in front of a mirror, applying makeup, her back to us, all in white; Winslow Homer’s “Peach Blossoms; Whistler’s large serene portrait of his friend, Arthur Jerome Eddy, in grays and his “Nocturne in Blue and Gold,” with the shapes of ships barely visible in he mist of the Southampton Canal, clouds and smoke mixed, and a small gold disc of a hazy moon; John Singer Sergeant’s impressionistic portraits in white, in the tropics, informal setings, with light and shadows, one of Charles Deering, 1917.  There are good Georgia O’Keefe’s, Abiquiu sand hills before green mesas, bold greens; and Daniel Chester French’s small, but wonderful statue of Abraham Lincoln, standing and thinking with head down.

For the trip back home, I rent a car, driving west to Delevan, Wisconsin, a midwestern version of a New England small town.  From there I make it to Owatonna, Minnesota, where I visit Louis Sullivan’s Farmers and Merchants Bank, 1908, beautiful interior with terra cotta murals, cast iron vegetation decoration, sky lights above, and a large green art glass windows all around, high up, casting a green glow out onto the street at night.  From the street, the bank is a palette of green glass, terra cota, burgundy brick, and bronze trim.

On the freeway, I listen to an audio tape of “Anna Karenina,” as I enjoy the flat landscape.  A red sky dusk is replaced by a full moon peeking through an overcast night.  I love driving the interstate at night.  White headlights, with orange lights above them, outline the silhouettes of 16 wheelers coming from the opposite direction.  Green and white road signs pop up at intervals, on overpasses.  There are occasional lights off to the sides in the distance.  Radio towers, red lit. Even in the dark and overcast, you can see a glimmer of light to the south, a light gray haze.  Perhaps Iowa is not overcast.  As I drive into South Dakota night, I switch to the 1960s music station.  Each song brings back memories of places and time.  Bobby Vinton reminds me of El Paso in the early 1960s, the Dave Clark Five of Ft. Ord in California, the Righteous Brothers of Roswell High School.  The night reception is crystal clear, like KOMA of my college years, driving nights like this between Lubbock and Roswell.

The next day I am between Sioux Falls and Rapid City, on I-90.  I pull over atop an overpass on the interstate, and turn off the car engine to enjoy the view.  The wind is whipping the car.  You can hear it pounding against the side.  I am watching billowy pipelines of clouds in rows, moving fast, in formation, to the southeast.  This is wild country, sparsely populated.  A red Dodge pickup passes me up on the overpass.  Other pick ups with trailers and 16 wheelers are running on the interstate below, working trucks, but new.  You hear the tires first.  The gray clouds above are now turning lavender gray, and I am reminded what a beautiful orb the Earth is.  As I pull out, the sun is shining through the clouds, the wind is blowing through the grasses, the trucks are rumbling below, the wind is rushing, and high above is a blue sky, above the layers of clouds.

As I pass through South Dakota Badlands, there are beautiful black mounds all around, like Rwandan coffee hills, often a darker greenish-khaki color like Indian Army uniforms. Ahead, in Wyoming, new land is emerging, with fewer clouds, more mesas, shorter grass, and silver-domed mountains in the background.  Fourteen miles south of Sheridan, Wyoming, where my maternal grandparents were married in 1919,I can see teal-colored pine forests running to the West, towards Montana.  The land is more undulating and the hills more conical, like foothills, as I head north towards Custer Country, the Little Big Horn, and Billings.  The evening sun creates pink skies under a light blue dome.  At a small farm, painted horses are running to feed in their corrals.  The other horses in the corral turn their backs to a cold wind that has come up.  The highway is distinctive Wyoming, red clay, like French Open tennis courts.  Ahead, a gray cloud covers the sky like a large blanket, but off to the west, the sky is blue.  I realize I have been under a canopy of big sky all day, through South Dakota and Wyoming, desolate, a lone traveler on the sphere from Chicago to Sheridan, crossing the northern plains for two great days.   It is dark as I cross the Montana boundary.  I look forward to the drive: Billings and great trout and river country, passing Big Timber, Livingston, Bozeman, all magical, with roads leading south to Red Lodge, the Beartooth and Absoroka Mountains,  and Paradise Valley, also magical.

I am listening to the audio tape of Anna Karenina.  Tolstoy understands human emotions so well.  His description of Anna when she is first introduced, meeting Vronsky on the train at the provincial station stop is masterly, her warmth coming from her face, her nature overcoming her reserve, her ability to resolve the broken marriage of her brother, knowing what to say, her inner thoughts right on the mark.  And, Tolstoy’s animals are great.  His Laska, Levin’s faithful dog in Karenina, is a joy, lying down with his head on Stephan’s shoe when he visits getting his gums rearranged around his teeth, then settling in and falling asleep.   When setting out bird hunting, pulling everything together, Laska was so excited that he ran around licking everyone, even the guns.  Levin and Stephan take a pause after shooting and talk, but Laska looks up at the sky and perks his ears, as if to reproach them for not paying attention to the hunt. And there is Fru Fru, Vronsky’s gray mare, who ran the steeple chase.  You feel the nervousness of the horse, flaring her nostrils and poking her lead foot on the straw, and the “blood” which is important in breeding and racing,  Tolstoy has a total understanding of horses, describing the way Fru Fru tries to get up after breaking her back, falling  back and burying her nose in the ground and looking knowingly at Vronsky with her eyes.  She tried to rise, but could get only her two front legs up.  Anna Karenina is interesting for its romance and its Nineteenth Century Russian history lesson, showing Russian peasantry becoming more disgruntled.  Levin in a 19th Century liberal, and dislikes “speculators,” who are not merchants.  There are other lessons from Tolstoy.   Kitty, the youngest daughter, jilted by Vronsky, realizes while recuperating in Germany that it is better to think only of others, not of one’s self, to devote yourself to helping others.  And Anna offers some insights, too, telling her brother that “it is never too late to mend, an English saying.”  Things can, she says, usually be reversed for the better.   These are good lessons for anyone driving along life’s highway.   I am thinking of home and the macaroon cookies at the Wheat Bakery near Three Forks on the way. (2011)