Sylvia's Journal

My friends Joellen and Carol, both ex colleagues, showed up in my dream last night; independently. I remember at some point that I was to tell each one that the other was also going to Haiti. The dream happened someplace else and consisted of different chapters with entirely different stories; one before waking up in the middle of the night and the other after. The last phase took place on a gorgeous estate someplace near the ocean. Except for Axel I did not know the people who showed up in my dream. We all shared the immense place peacefully; maybe because we were all trespassing as it was not ours.

The daffodils were out, the vistas spectacular. To (or from) this place I rode in some form of public transport and had kicked my shoes off and put my possessions on the dusty and dirty ground where they had rolled around during the trip. At some point I had to get off and had to scramble to find everything. People were helpful but it was still a scramble. I reluctantly went down on all fours to scout under the seats for my things. I never found out wether I ever got off the train or tram or whatever it was.

Tired from the hard work of my dream I woke up in our Best Western hotel room with a view of the parking lot and Fall River’s industrial area beyond. The parking lot is empty except for a handful of cars, a touring bus and a truck. The interior of the room is sleek and functional: an enormous TV and king size bed, a black microwave and refrigerator, a dark wood grain veneer kitchen/media center and desk, two armchairs upholstered in a silver/grey metallic check, a (fake?) leather executive swivel chair, and 5 lamps on brushed metal pedestals. If you have to work and stay here for awhile it is not a bad place. It even has wireless. The outside is designed by an architect from the ‘build-a-box’ school.

It took us 3 hours to drive to Yale’s Art Gallery for an exhibit that could be seen in about one hour. It was a delightful exhibit that spoke to Picasso’s experimentation with various printing techniques (etching, dry point, linocuts, and lithographs) and his playful illustrations of the writing from Ovid, Balzac, and his contemporary writer friends.

While I enjoyed the playfulness and/or clean lines of his illustrations (I don’t care about his cubist work) it is hard for me not to include in my appreciation of him his terrible treatment of women and his appalling home life – I have a hard time separating the two and so looked at his accomplishments different from the way Axel looked at them. Axel is taking a class on printing and sees something very different. But we both agreed that it had been worth the long drive.

With a few minutes to spare we visited one more floor of the wonderful building in which the collection is housed. Axel got all excited to find a (yellow) Josef Albers’ square. He had done a project about him for his graphic design course some years ago. Seeing the real thing is very different from seeing a picture of it. There were other surprises and gems but then we were alerted that the museum was closing and we left, reluctantly.

We drove to our hotel in Fall River via Newport over the two spectacular bridges that span Narragansett Bay. You have to pay a toll but it is worth the ride, especially after nightfall with all the lights. In Fall River we scrambled to check in, select a place to eat and then find it (in a city we don’t know) in time before it would be closing for the night.

We arrived at a full restaurant where most people were just paying their check and ended up being the last two diners. It was a delightful Portuguese restaurant,Sagres, named after the town in southern Portugal where Henri the Navigator built his school in the 1500s for other restless souls and from where he discovered the world. The restaurant’s fare is primarily fish, with several dishes based on the famous salted cod, bacalao, great vinho verde and a wide choice of porto varieties to end the meal. We followed the recommendations from our young Portuguese speaking waiter and had no regrets, although we did have to drink a lot of water during the night to recover from all the salt.