Hi, all. This is a pretty packed one! Last Friday I went to visit my grandmother for the long holiday weekend. I got a bonus Artist Date in there — this art exhibit was on at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and since I missed it when it was in New York and really wanted to see it, I went on Friday. It was worth the trip and I enjoyed perusing the various works, reading descriptions and noting where the paintings were borrowed from (private collections! and other art museums like the lovely looking Museum of Modern Art of Paris, Buffalo AKG Art Museum, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art.) I always wish I could absorb more information and more images than I could possibly carry home with me. I learned about some female artists of the Parisian avant-garde, including Hermine David, and especially enjoyed seeing works by Raoul Dufy and André Derain – “les Fauves.” This week I started reading the memoir of Berthe Weill, titled, Pow! Right in the Eye!: Thirty Years Behind the Scenes of Modern French Painting. Lol.
The rest of the weekend went well bH – I visited with a few great-aunts and saw a few of my mother’s cousins, had lunch with my aunt, and went to my grandfather’s kever with my uncle.
This week, my Artist Date was a virtual book talk (with pictures) on Jewish Country Houses, a fascinating topic!
In another moment of synchronicity, a book was recommended both in a course I took and a newsletter I read about a week apart.
On the plane, I discovered Spotify Offline Backup. Do you know how this works? The available songs seemed really random, and were different on my flight home.
Nature moments for this indoorsy girl: Montreal was bursting with hydrangea bushes in bloom, and pink and white impatiens everywhere. I saw a tiny brown bunny hop across my grandmother’s front lawn which was unexpected because it’s a fairly urban neighborhood. And I flew Porter; their planes don’t climb to very high altitudes, and on my flight home we flew through puffy white cloudscapes aglow with the setting sun and my nose was pressed to the window. It felt completely magical, like the way I thought flying would feel before I’d ever flown.
When I reread the Harry Potter series last summer, I was struck by how poorly the movie adaptations portrayed the feel of the books, and I am hopeful that the upcoming TV adaptation will stay truer to the characters as portrayed in the book and will do a better job at conveying the charm and believability of the magical world. Here is the cast so far. I’m cautiously optimistic.
This thread title made me lol.
Laura Vanderkam suggested planning a pilgrimage and I realized that when I travel, that’s what I do! And that’s also why I can’t relate well to how most other people plan trips. They’re not planning pilgrimages!
Thank you for sticking by, and have an enjoyable Shabbos! And an easy fast if you are fasting!
(Photo credit: John Wu/Pexels)
