Delights: June 12 to June 18

June 12: My sister Dianne and I are in Boston visiting her daughter Tara. Why — all of a sudden — are the hotel prices so high? Is there some, uh, world sporting event happening in North America right now? In the U.S.? In Boston? (We chose this weekend because the Boston Red Sox are playing at home…)

Sure, we saw lots of men in kilts on the train yesterday. And people with lovely accents were all around us in the hotel lobby. A nice man from Scotland helped us with our elevator keycards last night. Then this morning we saw — everyone!

So much fun to be in a World Cup city!! Go Scotland — and whatever team YOU are rooting for.

June 13: Today, my sister and niece joined me at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, which offered us a banquet of Greek and Roman antiquities, Asian art and Renaissance objects, medieval cloisters and Venetian palaces, Spanish tiles and Italian textiles — along with John Singer Sargent and Rembrandt. 

I think of Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840-1924) as a woman who collected, cultivated and curated surprise. She paired leather-tooled wall panels with Belgian lace. She draped church vestments over a chair and propped an icon of a saint on its lap. She installed a plain brown frame around sculpted horses surging out of stone. She mounted 19th century plumbing fixtures on a Roman basin. She squeezed the triangular shape of a lunging Roman warrior under a Venetian-style arch. 

Isabella Stewart Gardner spent decades building and perfecting not only her art collection, but also the very particular presentation of it. For example, she paired Sargent’s El Jaleo with Moroccan tiles and Spanish pottery, and augmented them with a massive mirror placed at right angles. She installed a bronze sculpture of a pigeon on her palazzo window sill. She situated — in the very corner of the room — a painting on an otherwise empty wall to echo the window inches away.

And she left very specific instructions in her will to make no permanent changes to the museum displays. 

I just finished reading an engaging biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner entitled Chasing Beauty, by Natalie Dykstra. Her brilliant, idiosyncratic, breathtaking collection tells her story too, exactly as she intended.

June 14: Confession: even though I’m technically a New York Knicks fan, I didn’t follow the NBA postseason very closely until we were all reminded (repeatedly) that the Knicks hadn’t won a championship since 1973. 

Hmmmm, 1973. I recall that team vividly: Frazier, Reed, Monroe, Bradley, DeBusschere, Lucas, Jackson and more. I also recall my Dad phoning my hotel room — during my Washington, D.C., eighth grade class trip! — to tell me the happy news. 

I rarely summon this memory. And when I do, I don’t want to verify it. Could this simply be a “memory” conjured from likely things my Dad would have done? Better to leave it alone.

Today, though, while reading every article I could find about the 2026 Knicks’ championship, I decided I needed to know. The internet, of course, could not report the dates of the 1973 Shrewsbury Grammar School eighth grade class trip, but I did remember my Dad calling me at the hotel on my birthday. If my Dad had indeed phoned me the following night about the Knicks, I now had a verifiable date.

Hey, Google, what day did the Knicks win their 1973 championship? I typed and held my breath: May 10, 1973. Verification complete.

So, Dad, thank you for navigating the hotel switchboard to make sure I knew about the Knicks. Thank you for sharing my joy. And thank you — in such a characteristic way — for seeding a memory that would bloom so many years later. 

June 15: Apparently, I make a habit of going sightseeing when the Knicks win championships. Yesterday, after I finally stopped Knicks-scrolling, we all visited Boston’s North End for Italian cookies and then traveled a few transit stops to the Museum of Fine Arts. Among many many treasures, I relished an Egyptian funerary gown, painstakingly reconstructed bead by tiny bead. 

More than 4,500 years old, the “beadnet” dress had been found in 1927 draped over the mummified remains of a female contemporary of King Khufu, builder of the Great Pyramid of Giza. Although the strings had disintegrated, the beads’ pattern remained. In my opinion, its beauty is worthy of Italian haute couture.

June 16: Waking up in my own bed. Exercise. Coffee with a dear friend. Taking a nap. (A perfect day comes in many forms.)

June 18: “Where does she find all that energy?” The more apt question right now is, “Where did she leave all that energy? Why is she lying on her living room floor, flat as a pancake?” 

So, yes, donning the label Last-Minute Lucy, I scurried yesterday to a stunning (and soon-closing)  exhibition highlighting the influence of Spanish surrealist Joan Miró on mid-century American abstract art. The exhibition rewarded very slow looking. Which was good, because I lacked stamina for any other kind.

Then off to a baseball game and home, where I crumpled in a heap.

So maybe “doing” flat-as-a-pancake today is a good thing. Especially when I use unfolded laundry as my pillow.

Bonus: That Miró painting reminds me of the 2010 video installation The Last Post, by Shahkia Sikander, at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. 

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