Boston, Part III

I'll save the baseball non-enthusiasts game detail, although I enjoyed trying my hand at sports writing. It was an afternoon game, a pitcher's duel. Few hits and fewer runs. The Angels went up early and stayed up. The final score was Angels 3, Sox 1. It was a four game stand, we saw three of them. The teams split. The Angels held their ground against the Mariners. The Sox held theirs against the Yankees. There are 38 games left in the 2007 season. Hold on to your hats.

Two short notes.

Note one: On Saturday we visited the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum out Huntingdon Avenue. It's around the corner from the Museum of Fine Arts and next door to Simmons College, Northeastern University, and Wentworth Institute of Technology. Given the number of schools in Boston, it appears that everything is next to one.

Gardner was quite the collector. In time, her collection became so large that in 1917 she designed and built a renaissance-era Venetian palace in her beloved Boston to house it. There are more than 2,500 objects - paintings, sculpture, furniture, textiles, drawings, silver, ceramics, illuminated manuscripts, rare books, photographs and letters - from ancient Rome, Medieval Europe, Renaissance Italy, Asia, the Islamic world and 19th-century France and America.

Note two: Woody, Bill, Mary Bruce, and Rossi, my sabbatical advisory panel -- thanks again for the moleskine and the field glasses. Both have been considerable help in my efforts to "see the world with new eyes." They were both used extensively on this leg of my sabbatical. Here is one of the entries I made in the moleskine from the JFK Library. Kennedy was asked how he became a war hero. We all know the PT 109 story. Kennedy replied, "It was involuntary. The Japanese sunk my boat." I am currently rereading "Profiles in Courage" as a result of my visit to the library and museum.

That's it for the moment. Peace.

Additional photographs will be forthcoming.