We know a few folks who’ve worked at or graduated from Colby College, but had never visited the campus. It’s located about ten minutes from downtown Waterville on Mayflower Hill—a pleasant spread of green dotted with red brick buildings and athletic fields. A guard at another museum (which will remain nameless) told us that the best art museum in Maine, “its Louvre,” is the art museum here, which prompted this visit.
Founded in 1959 and housed in a contemporary building with two levels and five wings, the Colby College Museum of Art has a wonderful collection focusing primarily on American art from all periods with some pieces from Europe and Asia.
Whimsical seating
The entrance hall includes some fanciful shrub seating while the lobby area is airy and light-filled with splashy red chairs. The young woman at the reception desk was most welcoming and helpful.
Photo in Theaster Gates collection
We spent time looking at some of the thousands of photographs from Ebony magazine in Theaster Gates: Facsimile Cabinet of Women Origin Stories and then marveled at the intricately worked baskets and the colorful paintings which are part of an exhibit of arts and crafts of the First Nations People of Maine and Maritime Canada.
Fancy Basket, 1997 by Peter Neptune
The exhibit is titled, Wiwenikan: the beauty we carry, and includes works from the Maliseet, Micmac, Passamaquoddy, Penobscot, and Abenaki that collectively are known as the Wabanaki.
I also particularly enjoyed some of the contemporary paintings and sculpture in the permanent collection including two works by Maya Lin, with whom we spent some time in our San Francisco years. Lin’s works are small in scale, one made all of straight pins, and better appreciated up close in person.
Burning House, Night, Vertical, 2007 by Lois Dodd
Untitled, 2010 by Anish Kapoor The Hostess, c. 1928 by Ellie Nadelman
This is a first-rate museum and well worth a visit. For us, it was only about an hour and half’s drive from the coast. Admission is free to both the campus community and the general public.
To cap off our tour, on the recommendation of the museum staff, we drove downtown, easily found a place to park in a large free lot, and then had a most satisfying lunch at the Last Unicorn Restaurant.
The Chief Penguin and I both selected one of the lunch-sized chicken entrees which came with a small green salad and basmati rice. Salads and sandwiches were also on offer with seating inside or outdoors at umbrella tables.
Earlier this week, we headed south of Portland to visit friends on the outskirts of Biddeford. This is a part of Maine we had not seen before, and we were struck by its quiet beauty. Their house sits above Hills Beach bordered by rock with a view toward Basket Island. There are homes there and the owners can drive their cars over the sand at low tide—quite amazing. It being low tide we walked along the sand to the edge of the island.
Lunch was at a general store cum deli counter near Biddeford Pool where we ordered salmon salad, pokes, and fish tacos. Opting for a picnic table on the grass, we had a view of the placid water on this gloriously warm blue-sky day.
Later, Jill gave us a personal tour of downtown Biddeford. An historic textile town (former home of Pepperell), Biddeford is having a bit of a renaissance with a weekly farmers’ market, a cozy café/used bookstore, live music on the street, weekday tours of the mill, and a selection of appealing restaurants and shops. Definitely worth a return visit!
Mural in downtown Biddeford
SUMMER READING
The Guest Book by Sarah Blake
This is one of the best books I’ve read this summer. Set mostly in Maine, it is not a simple read, and I puzzled over some of the family relationships (there are Evelyns in two generations, e.g.). Initially, I found Blake’s prose choppy, with no smooth rhythm, but then I got into her groove. She excels at creating the atmosphere around Crockett’s Island and the hold the island with its big frame house, white, faded and worn, has on this, the third generation of upper crust cousins. Especially Evie. She is the principal character in the present day, a middle-aged academic, married to Paul, a Jew, and mother to teenager Seth.
Evie and her cousins need to make a decision whether to sell or keep the island and house since the trust money for its upkeep is close to running out. Grandfather Owen Milton and his wife Kitty bought the island decades ago. The Miltons took great pride in being Miltons, being successful in business, and living life according to a certain set of mostly unwritten rules. They were at the top of the societal heap and both proud of it and complacent. In their world, one associated with members of one’s own class, one’s children attended only the best schools, and, of course, they married the right people.
Joan, Evie’s recently deceased mother, had one dying wish— to be buried at the island, but not in the graveyard, instead by the picnic area. Evie is unsettled since she doesn’t know why there, and she encounters objections from her cousins. She is an historian whose life work has been uncovering the truths in letters, diaries and archives. But, she feels she knows little about her mother who lived life in the shadows, not fully present to her.
Author Sarah Blake (bookbub.com)
The novel is layered, replete with family secrets, and moves back and forth in time, mainly between the 1930’s, 1959, and the present day. In the 30’s, Grandfather Owen has business dealings in Germany; in 1959, a pre-wedding gathering on the island ominously brings together family members with two outsiders; and in the present, Evie wrestles with a recurring dream about her mother, and with why she herself feels so tied to keeping the island and having nothing change.
Issues of race, religion, and class surface in the characters of Len Levy, who works for Owen Milton, and Reg Pauling, a black man who is Len’s friend and former Harvard classmate. How these two men intersect with the Miltons and how, together and separately, Len and Reg challenge various family members to examine their beliefs and actions make for a novel that I will ponder for some time to come. Highly recommended! For more about what shaped the work, check out this interview with Sarah Blake. (~JWFarrington)
No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know about Domestic Violence Can Kill Us by Rachel Louise Snyder
This is a heavy book about an issue, really a crime, which is often misunderstood and occasionally overlooked. Known familiarly as domestic violence, this author believes it should more appropriately be called something like “intimate-partner violence” or “intimate-partner terrorism.” The statistics on the number of incidents worldwide are staggering, and Snyder presents several case histories that ended in a woman’s death. Death despite restraining orders, time in a shelter, interactions with the police, and the like. For beat cops, domestic disputes have too frequently been viewed as nuisance calls rather than criminal behavior. Added to that, women victims too often recant their testimony due to fear of greater consequences.
Snyder discusses a new tool called the Dangerousness Scale which, if used and heeded, can predict which women are likely to be killed by their partners. One of the strongest predictors of death is if a woman has been strangled by her partner. Violence against a woman escalates in a repeating pattern as her partner works to isolate her from family and friends and to strictly control both her behavior and her movements. When there are children involved, the woman’s incentive to return to an unsafe home environment is largely because of fear of what the man might do to the children.
Author Snyder (amazon.com)
Fortunately, there is room for hope with new research and with the creation of programs for violent men that educate them about the toxic aspects of their masculinity and prompt them to change their actions. Snyder’s book has added depth thanks to the innumerable hours of interviews she conducted with battered women and their families and with abusers; these interviews form the basis for the case histories.
Recommended reading, but not for the beach. For a short piece about the crux of the issue, see this Atlantic article by Snyder. (~JWFarrington)
Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens is ten years old, and it keeps getting better each year. We visit on our own and also bring all of our guests. Our granddaughters are especially fond of the play house where there are kitchen appliances, a cupboard, and a small table and chairs where you can serve tea and cupcakes. Also a draw are the two old fashioned water pumps, a laundry tub with a washboard, a rowboat to climb into, the puppet theater, and a sandbox.
Steve Tobin sculpture
For adults, the scent garden is always worth wandering. And there’s also an outdoor art exhibit, “Unearthed,” a series of towering root sculptures by Pennsylvania artist Steve Tobin. The sculptures are made of metal and placed throughout the grounds. Some are realistic colors (brown and black) while others are bright such as a mustard yellow one and a glossy white one. The sculptures will be on view into 2020. A few years ago Lehigh University presented an outdoor exhibit of Tobin’s impressively large “Termite Hills” sculptures.
MAKING MEMORIES
Our son and daughter-in-law and two granddaughters were here for the week. E is a poised seven and F an active three, the age at which most kids form lasting memories. The Chief Penguin and I very much enjoy their annual visits to Maine and know that even when we’re gone, they will have Maine memories.
Memories of making blueberry pancakes with Grandma, of sampling Grandpa’s muffins, of visiting the botanical gardens, of clambering on the rocks at Molly’s Point for sea glass, shells, and smooth stones, of checking out the books and toys at Sherman’s, and memories of riding the narrow gauge train at Railway Village and more.
E is a voracious reader and quickly devours chapter books. F is at the “why?” stage and is a fan of trains and motion. Together the girls and I read umpteen stories, played with Josie and Rosie, their dolls, and colored and created with construction paper using an assortment of pencils, pens, and crayons.
There was no set schedule and the mornings flowed from a leisurely breakfast, to a walk in the yard or games on the deck, followed by an afternoon outing, and then dinner, be it pizza with friends and their grandkids, hot dogs and lobster rolls on the deck at Cozy’s, or comfort food here at Grandma and Grandpa’s. It was about as perfect a week as could be!
RECENT READING
America’s Reluctant Prince: The Life of John F. Kennedy Jr. by Steven Gillon
Much has been written about JFK Jr. and the Kennedys in the twenty years since his tragic death in 1999. One might wonder why we need yet another tome, and this one is a tome. Gillon was the graduate assistant in an undergraduate course Kennedy took at Harvard. Only a few years older than John, he became a friend and the two got together occasionally over the years. John sought out Gillon’s advice and writing suggestions when he was editing George magazine. While John was alive, Gillon respected and protected his privacy; now he feels comfortable sharing his perspective and his knowledge of the challenges John faced as a Kennedy, the standard bearer after his father’s death.
What was most interesting to me was the account of Kennedy’s years founding and creating George and struggling to make it a truly viable proposition. There is new information on his wife Carolyn’s inability to adjust to being trailed by the press, her volatile behavior, and her drug use, all of which made a marriage fraught with tension more tumultuous. It is in this context of daunting issues at work, difficulties at home, and the prolonged dying of his closest friend (his cousin Anthony), that John Jr. takes off on that fateful flight. The book is overly detailed and, sometimes tedious, but I found myself modifying and enlarging my view of this Kennedy. (~JWFarrington)
If you are a reader and a booklover, then this novel set in a small town in Cornwall should delight you. When her father Julius, bookshop owner extraordinaire, dies, his daughter Emilia inherits Nightingale Books. Emilia has lived in Hong Kong for some years and returns to deal with his affairs and discovers that he was beloved by the townspeople. Julius was an unofficial therapist or at least a willing ear, but a lousy businessman. While Emilia’s efforts to save the shop are one focus of this story, it’s also a series of vignettes of individuals who patronize the bookstore, some of whom have been unsuccessful or unlucky in finding love. Like a box of bonbons, it’s a sweet and charming novel with happy endings for all.
SMALL SCREEN
Borgen (Apple TV)
Last summer we binge watched the final season of The Americans. This year we raced through all of the latest Grantchester episodes and were hungry for more good viewing. The Chief Penguin found us Borgen and now we’re glued to it.
The prime minister and Katrine (Vanity Fair)
It’s a fictional Danish political drama produced in 2010 about Birgitte Nyborg, the first female prime minister. With a parliamentary system that requires the party leader who becomes prime minister to have a majority of seats or a majority made up of a coalition of parties, there’s lots of wheeling and dealing among the players to arrive at a viable candidate. Besides the prime minister and her husband and two children, the key characters are Katrine, a TV news reporter, and Kasper, a politico/spin doctor. The series is fast paced and totally absorbing, partly because you become enmeshed in the complicated personal lives of these individuals. There are three seasons and we have now watched the first five episodes in Season 1. The first episode is free, but then you have to pay.
RETURN TO ROCKLAND
On another gorgeous Maine day, we took our friends up to Rockland for a visit to the Farnsworth Art Museum. This lovely museum has a strong collection of works by various members of the Wyeth Family from N.C. Wyeth, the patriarch, to Andrew Wyeth, his son, to Jamie Wyeth, Andrew’s son, as well as works by the siblings and other relatives.
Catching Pollen
This summer, in addition to the Wyeth family paintings in the permanent collection, there are two special exhibits of Jamie Wyeth’s work, Untoward Occurrences and Other Things, scenes of Monhegan Island featuring artist Rockwell Kent and others, and Phyllis Mills Wyeth: A Celebration, paintings of his wife over more than 50 years. Sadly, she died this past January.
I especially enjoyed the Phyllis paintings for the range of emotions depicted, from the exuberance of “Catching Pollen” to the quiet determination in “And Then into the Deep Gorge,” and the mystery of “Wicker.”
And Then into the DeepGorgeWicker
In addition to the Wyeth exhibits, there is a small one of some contemporary screens, room dividers, that are quite a mixed lot in terms of style.
From The Screen Show exhibit
We had such a great experience we returned to Rockland and the museum this week with my sister and brother-in-law. I loved the Wyeth exhibits even more the second time!
LUNCH FARE
Continuing a quest to sample local beers, we ate lunch last week at the Rock Harbor Pub and Brewery on the main street. The guys ordered two different beers and were happy with their choices. The fish tacos and the haddock sandwich were both very good. The lobster rolls, part of their summer lobster specials, had a decent amount of very fresh lobster, but the roll suffered from not having been grilled and buttered. Fries and cole slaw were also fine.
This visit, for an even better lobster roll (which also came with fries and cole slaw), we went down the block to the Brass Compass and sat outside at one of their umbrella tables. Perfect Maine.
