"To supply a thought is mental massage; but to evolve a thought of your own is an achievement. Thinking is a brain exercise — and no faculty grows save as it is exercised."
-Elbert Hubbard
Another weekday, another high speed pass through this blog. I missed yesterday altogether. Going to a friend's for supper tonight, when in fact I have no damned business doing anything but my paying work. Every second I spend on bonhomie I fall further behind. Today I need to draft an answer in a complicated construction case (due today), draft a witness outline for a trial on Thursday, draft an outline for a witness I'll depose here in a few hours, etc., etc. It never ends.
So despite all that, I'll wallow here in a little reverie as I recall my last really happy weekend, spent with Peg in a place that occupied my dreams for years, and proved itself to be exactly what I'd hoped.
Two Saturdays ago Peg and I hopped into the roadster and drove the two-and-a-half hours to the east, for a Saturday night at Chautauqua. I've described the place here previously, a community that started as a training camp for Sunday School teachers 150 years ago, now a center for culture and intellectual stretching for a few magic weeks every summer. As with everything else in my life these days, this would be a quick trip, one night instead the week or two most folks spend there to really marinate in the vibe of the place and recharge from the corrosive existence most of us lead day-to-day.
But first, there was Cuba. Cuba, New York, that is, nestled in a little valley maybe halfway between Corning and Lake Chautauqua.
It is known for its cheese, or so Cuba's buildings tell us.
We were charmed by the town, a lowbrow version of Corning with a red brick downtown and some sort of animal fair and petting zoo set up on the steps in front of its town library.
Peg needed to pet a goat, of course.
And yes, those unfortunates in the cage appear to be groundhogs, captive versions of the animals that crawl out of the sod to mock me in the Number16 tee box at the Corning Country Club.
Another hour on the road and we arrived at our destination, the Chautauqua Institute and the Athenaeum Hotel.
Upon our arrival, we walked below the quote painted across a beam in the majestic lobby, which sort of summed up the vision of the Institute.
But then there was a bit of trouble, as I realized they had rented us an interior room, big but with a view of walls and windows. This wouldn't do. I'd reserved a lakefront room, by God. My temper started to spike, and P chalked it up to hypoglycemia and ordered us a couple appetizers and a drink in the bar (pictured in the upper left of the photo) while I paced and choked back my ire at the staff.
Finally, however, the situation was remedied, and we had our lakefront room, just in time to watch a gaggle of oversized Corgis engage in an organized race across the lawn outside.
These old folks and their dogs. Later they had a reception for themselves on the broad lakefront porch, dogs in tow. We pirated a glass of wine from their bar, generously tipping the bartendress, and tried to enjoy the lake in a pair of rocking chairs until a very loud group of Yankee septuagenerians chased us to another spot where we could hear ourselves think. That birth control accent. Ye gods!
Late afternoon we tramped through the neighborhood on our way to a chamber music concert in one of the halls scattered around the property. One looks around and sees what Seaside and Watercolor were aping.
Only these houses have been here over a century, and the ethos is one of kindness and inclusion. Hard to picture the MAGA malignancy gaining traction here, but it's grown over and warped those ersatz Chautauquas occupied by new money Southern millionaires in south Walton.
Once we arrived at the concert, we found that our "gate passes" were MIA, so we had to tramp back to the welcome center to get them reissued. The gate pass is a very cool thing about Chautauqua, once you learn how to use it. When you check into a property there, you're issued a pass that provides admission to all of the lectures, concerts, and plays that fill the calendar each day.
But if you can't find your gate pass, you're SOL.
So we missed the first piece performed by the chamber quartet, but arrived back in time for forty glorious minutes of Brahms, expertly explained beforehand by a tall, thin pianist with unkempt gray hair (there's lots of gray hair at Chautauqua, which is worrisome for our future as a country as the younger crowd prefers to plumb the intellectual shallows of TikTok) and then expertly performed by a fabulous group of musicians. I started to settle down finally, to slip into the vibe.
After the concert we were still stuffed with appetizers and spent a lot of time just walking the shady streets, past well-kept old Victorian and craftsman cottages, seeing the occasional house sponsored by the Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Disciples of Christ, and Unitarians. A lollapalooza for liberal, mainstream churches.
At eight we took our very good seats in the outdoor amphitheater for a performance of The Chevalier, a play based on the life of a black gentleman in pre-revolutionary France, Joseph Bologne, a polymath who was a composer, soldier, master fencer, etc. The play featured much of his music, and made the tenuous assertion that he taught Mozart how to write great pieces because they were neighbors for a few months in the 1780s. His compositions were every bit as lovely as anything Mozart composed, at least to this untrained ear, but the hagiography and overt political agenda of the play were a distraction. This guy was Jesus, Mozart, and Clausewitz, all in one, if we believe the depiction by the playwright. I'm not sure I buy that, although Bologne's extraordinary life and excellent musical compositions leave one wondering why we remember some lives but not others.
The next morning Peg insisted we hike in search of coffee rather than sipping the swill in the lobby and sitting among the geriatrics pawing at the pastry tray. After another walk, we made our way to the Episcopal Chapel of the Good Shepherd for a little Rite II.
The priests were a husband-and-wife team from a parish in Michigan. Clergy sign up to take a week here at Chautauqua, with daily services and maybe a Wednesday night Bible study, in exchange for staying at the Episcopal House for free. His homily was one of the finest I've heard, delivered with neither notes nor an "uh", stitching together all three readings and binding the package of scripture to the stresses and threats of America in 2022.
His wife chose to sing Eucharistic Prayer B. Why do priests do this? So very few can actually sing. I'm pretty sure if it annoys me, it annoys Elohim.
The musical guest was an ordained minister and music professor from a college in Ohio, who during the offertory played a hypnotic piece on a Native American flute. It sounds odd, but it worked.
Then, then, it was time to pack up and make our way home to Corning so I could load up the Columbia and fly south to KECP. We'd spent a short twenty hours in paradise, surrounded by tolerance and beauty and intellectual rigor. If Disney or Universal are the apotheosis of what modern actually America values, Chautauqua represents our better selves. A slower pace. Lots of green spaces, and almost no TVs anywhere. Families riding bikes along the lake's edge. Signs and flags in yards celebrating kindness and peace. A scene that reminds us of the better angels of our nature, buried and muted beneath the layers of life's cares and distractions.
And there's a reason Chautauqua is in upstate New York, and Disneyworld is in Florida. Just sayin'.
Back to work. I have a pretrial in a half-hour, and haven't done anything to prepare. Welcome to my world.
Comments