ART AND EATING IN BRUNSWICK
For years, we’ve driven Route 1 on the outskirts of Brunswick past strip malls, fast food restaurants, and auto repair shops. We had never ventured any farther into downtown Brunswick. This week we did and discovered that Maine Street (it’s really named that) is quite charming with several blocks of shops, a wide variety of restaurants and cafes, and even a couple of bookstores. Just beyond a lovely park is the beginning of the Bowdoin College campus.
Bowdoin is an old liberal arts institution, chartered in 1794, and has produced an illustrious group of alumni. Among them are generals, statesmen, explorers, and the writers, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The campus stretches along one side of the street opposite attractive old style frame houses. It has an extensive expanse of green and a mix of a few contemporary buildings interspersed among more classic red brick architecture.
The Chief Penguin and I walked the half mile from where we parked the car to our destination, the Bowdoin Museum of Art. The art department has a grand old building listed on the National Historic Register. Next to it is a glass cube, the entrance to the museum itself.
Among the featured exhibitions, we paid the most attention to At First Light: Two Centuries of Artists in Maine. This is a marvelous exhibit filling several small galleries with paintings, a quilt, and a Wabanaki basket. Artists include George Bellows, Alex Katz, Lois Dodd, N. C. and Jamie Wyeth, along with others I hadn’t previously encountered. Here are a couple of my favorite works.
After the museum, we met my Scarborough cousin and his wife for lunch at one of the two Indian restaurants on the main drag. Shere Punjab, a small colorfully painted family-run business, offered up delicious curries and naan. Collectively, we sampled the chicken and lamb curries and the fish curry. Fluffy basmati rice was served with them. It was so good we all vowed to eat there again!
MAINE BOOK FOR THE WEEK—A SUMMER COLONY
Haven Point by Virginia Hume
Haven Point is a first novel by a former political writer and editor. It’s the kind of book you curl up with, and before you know it, the whole afternoon has whizzed by! The families with summer homes at Haven Point believe in its traditions, one being the annual singalong. It’s a colony established by upper-class sorts, all with the right educational and professional pedigrees.
Maren marries into the world of Haven Point when Dr. Oliver Larsen becomes her husband. She grew up on a farm in Minnesota and was a nurse with Oliver at Walter Reed Hospital in DC near the end of WWII. She feels like an outsider during much of her life in Maine.
Their daughter Annie is a talented artist, but battles alcoholism for many years. Annie’s daughter, Maren’s granddaughter Skye, is secretive and ashamed of her mother’s relapses. She also feels that Haven Point, with its Waspy whiteness is too insular a society. Love, tragedy, betrayal, and addiction run through this novel set between 1944 and 2008 told in multiple voices. I quickly became enmeshed in these characters’ lives and the hours disappeared. (~JWFarrington)
Note: Header photo is Summer by Frank Weston Benson, 1909. Photos ©JWFarrington (some rights reserved.)
