Not much here today as we spent most of the day in sessions or business meetings or various other exciting aspects of summer academia. The Yankee had two presentations, the one of which I saw was, naturally, awesome. I had to present in one session. The topic has some interest to it and we received some nice conversation over the work. That study is going places.
So, pretty much the full day was spent in one hotel meeting room or another. Here’s the view from our room:
That is World Trade Center East, with an inlet from the Boston Harbor behind it. You can see a lot of sailboats from there. Sixteen floors, eight elevators and completed in 2000. The architects are a firm that have built hospitals and campus buildings across a great swath of the country. One of their buildings, in fact, is a library at UAB, where The Yankee and I did our master’s degrees. Small world, huh?
We got out of the conference just in time to see the sun go down over the city’s skyline.
We walked from the hotel to the T, and then rode out to the aquarium where we met Wendy — we’d left her all alone and she didn’t get lost all day in her travels — for dinner at Legal’s. We must go here every visit, The Yankee insists. Pretty good stuff. We sat on the patio, listening to the horns of ferries and other ships as they came in for the evening.
Wendy had her first ever taste of New England clam chowder and proclaimed it delicious. Later, two people drove by and asked her for directions. This only happens to Wendy. As soon as she opens her mouth, though, the southern accent pours forth and the lost people realize their error. They’ll be getting no directional help. For the rest of the night we offered fake directions.
“Just go down yonder into the holler. Keep on that road a piece. Turn left by the old Miller barn and drive on that gravel road a spell. You’ll get to it directly.”
This sculpture is near our hotel, and is an unsettling image to walk past, even without context. It is the heads bowed and the horse’s neck stretched in defiance, or mourning, depending on how you feel at the moment. Even more so is the second horse, which is holding a different posture. Just to see the thing takes a little getting used to.
Andrzej Pitynski’s sculpture was on display at the popular Boston Common for years, but people didn’t like looking at it there, apparently. Freedom is fine to celebrate in Boston if it is the American Revolution, but don’t bother us with those Polish partisan fighters who battled the Nazis and the communists during World War II. Is that the problem? I’m clearly not up-to-date on the apparently heated opinions of this sculpture, but these folks are.
Here’s a piece on Pitynski, detailing his work, his inspiration, his family ties to the characters he sculpted and the world during the time of this project. Poland, where this was intended to go, was not that welcoming of such an homage in 1980, so this work somehow found its way to Boston. It got moved around a bit and finally put in storage for a few years. It has been by the World Trade Center since 2006.
Tomorrow: we catch a train for Connecticut.
