Connecticut: the 26th State

That is, the 26th State on my list...  It was obviously one of the first in the union as you cannot fail to notice driving through each little village that announces instead of population: Incorporated in 1665.  Or some other outrageously "old" date by American standards.

That is something that's struck me being here on the East Coast.  Can you imagine how silly it would be to have signs in the villages of Spain for example: La Roda, 720 A.D.  (that's just a guess actually.  I believe there were people living in "La Roda" before the muslim invasion of Spain in 711...although the church only dates from the 16th cent.)  It would be ridiculous, and yet we, as a country, are new enough that having existed for three hundred some-odd years is a source of pride to the point that we declare it upon entering any small town (out East anyway).  Age is very relative as it turns out.

I've gotten sidetracked from my initial purpose for writing which was to tell about my and Miriam's fabulous jaunt down to Connecticut.  It really did end up being a "jaunt" everything is so close out here.  When I was faced with the map of Massachusetts that occupied the entire two pages in Miriam's road atlas I thought this was going to be a much longer journey than it ended up being.  The scale had me completely baffled: an inch represented about 10 miles rather than twenty or fifty whatever it is I'm more used to seeing so that map makers can fit California into a reasonable space in a book.  I kept thinking we had much further to go than we did in reality and exclaimed throughout the whole drive, "We're already there?!"  Miriam was amused.

The drive should really have been even shorter than it was because we did end up getting slightly lost.  We were going the old fashioned way: ie. road atlas and Google Maps print-outs.  Neither of us has a smart phone and Miriam doesn't have a GPS in her car.  We got slightly turned around mostly because I hate Google Maps directions and need to see it on a map...but somehow couldn't find Mystic, CT. on the map and just thought it was because it was too small.  It turns out that I was looking about twenty miles west of where it actually was (yes, it's on the map) and so ended up giving contrary directions to Google Maps (whose directions, in my defense, weren't terribly clear to begin with).  Though it sounds like an oxymoron, I really am a good navigator when I know where I'm going! ;)

Needless to say, we were late for dinner, and poor Maggie was starving when we finally arrived.

We stayed the night in a little Inn on the Mystic River and had breakfast the next morning at a lovely little coffee shop called Bartleby's.  As we were heading back to the car from breakfast we ended up on the wrong side of the draw bridge over the river just as a small fleet of sail boats was passing through.  It was really cool to see the bridge go up so even though it pushed our schedule a little down to the wire we were glad to sit and watch the mechanics of this 1922 bridge.

From Mystic we drove west to Chester to visit Sol Lewitt's home and studio.  After lunch we also made a visit to the warehouse where a variety of personal works and works gifted to him or purchased by him are stored.  It was a very interesting visit.  The curator of the collection was a woman who had worked for some twenty years with Lewitt and knew him very personally and so not only could she tell us about his art and how he conceived his work, but she could bring the artist to life from a personal perspective, too.

It is always fascinating to get a peek at the unseen part of artistic creation.  I remember visiting the Picasso museum in Barcelona with Miriam and there was a show exhibiting his earliest sketches and scribbles...things never really intended for display, but that shed light on the artist all the same.  And of course when you're talking about Picasso, what he doodled on a napkin at some point in his youth, is intriguing.

Lewitt had a beautiful studio an entire wall of which was windows looking out at the surrounding birch forest.  He apparently never worked without blaring classical music, all of which he had copied onto cassette and carefully cataloged (some 4,000 tapes if I remember correctly).  My favorite was seeing his paints stored in old Skippy peanut butter and Tostitos salsa jars--so humanizing.

Lewitt's studio.