if only

A bookstore in San Louis Obispo with attitude. (Also a great used book selection.)

mighty big TV

At the Monterey Bay Aquarium on our trip north this summer.

on the rocks

interior

Sometimes a home looks the most perfectly inviting when you're peeking in the window.

(This is the house we rented in Cambria.)

through a lace curtain

Taken in Solvang, a touristy Danish town just outside Santa Barbara.

against the sky

Windblown Monterey Cypress. Central Coast, just north of San Simeon.

flashing past

boat slices

Kayaks on the Morro Bay pier.

"Cut it out, you guys!"

On the beach near San Simeon, a spot known as an elephant seal hangout.

sea of tranquility

Sunset on Moonstone Beach.

on dry land

Last week's Photo Fridaychallenge was foreign. I missed the cutoff but found myself thinking about the subject anyway. To me, foreign isn't necessarily about a language or culture not our own, because those are native in their own environment and we become the foreigners. But a boat in the dry California hills? A stranger in a strange land, a foreigner, lost and adrift. Maybe it can learn to float on wind instead of waves.

a veil of trees

At San Simeon State Beach.

small people, big sky

swarm

They came right up beside the boat, lured by the rain of fish flakes. Jack smelt up close.

I chose this image even though I have ones that are technically better -- sharper focus and so on -- because I thought it captured the motion and the chaos of the cloud of fish surrounding us.

home brew

At Zin Alley winery. (Good stuff.)

blue

My men at Peggy's Cove (Nova Scotia) last summer.

fractured

And so this travelogue of my weekend in Boston ends as it began, with a ghostly airport image.

real/not real

On Newbury Street in Boston.

celebration through the trees

At my cousin's wedding.

awaiting a wedding party

Charlie on the MTA

Did he ever return? No, he never returned and his fate is still unlearned. He will ride forever 'neath the streets of Boston, he's the man who never returned.

My uncle put the song in my head and it's still stuck there.

underground

A spooky T station. (T=MTA=subway)

(Pictures from my trip to Boston start here.)

an unusual conversation

Taken in Harvard Square on a sunny summer Sunday.

the Gold Room

It's just a glorified foyer, but I've always loved the room. (Yes, we're still in Adams House. At this rate, my single long weekend in Boston will end sometime in December. Hey, come back! I was just kidding. Sheesh.)

(Pictures from my trip to Boston start here.)

the echo of plates

The dining hall was not only empty of people but of tables and chairs too. The room felt at once cavernous and too small to be the site of so many bad-tasting meals with friends and enemies. Then there were the festive occasions: faculty dinners, waltzes, the yearly Christmas dinner complete with whole roast pig with the requisite apple in its mouth (and the ritualized reading from a Winnie the Pooh story). The room fit those times better than the usual scrape of fork and knife scooping mystery meat off cheap stoneware.

I'd forgotten about the griffins. And the stiff, formal portraits. I think (though my memory is not altogether reliable on this) that this one, in the place of honor just inside the entrance, is John Adams himself, Harvard alum and Adams House namesake.

I'm having fun with these. Are you?

(Pictures from my trip to Boston start here.)

mutant golf balls

Outside the Gold Coast (see yesterday's pic).

(Pictures from my trip to Boston start here.)

clearing out cobwebs

I was worried that with no students in residence, I wouldn't be able to get into my old college dorm (known in campus parlance as a House). No worries. A cleaning crew was there, preparing for the first day of school.

This part of Adams House is known as the Gold Coast. It was built by the Vanderbilts (in the 1880's? 1920's?) for their children and their children's friends and was later annexed by the school. I always loved the dark wood and marble. Like living inside history.

(Pictures from my trip to Boston start here.)

iconic

Picture a group of undergrads giggling through the snow, dining hall trays tucked under their arms. Picture these little-more-than-children on their bellies sliding down the majestic, so-historic Widener Library steps on tray sleds. Picture wind-reddened cheeks and wind-torn hair. Picture them running up the slippery steps again and again in the dark to do it just one more time.

medieval castle

Or maybe not. Maybe it's just Sever Hall, the site of various classes and seminars. The site, basically, of many and sundry doodle pads, though I suppose they've been replaced by Tetris on everyone's laptop computers. That door is a gothic gracenote in an otherwise colonial setting.

tour guide to the past

The strangest thing was seeing all the tour groups wandering Harvard Yard. Were they there when I was an undergrad? They must have been. Was I so myopically focused on my own little world that I blocked them out or were they so ubiquitous they became part of the scenery? Maybe they were simply more noticeable this time because classes hadn't started yet, the students were still AWOL, the Yard barren of frisbees, sunners, and study groups lolling on the lawn. And so an odd time to visit, the place inhabited mainly by ghosts from my past rather than flesh and blood people.

Well, except for those tour groups.

NYC reconceived