Santa Fe

Chamber music belongs in spaces and places with lots of blue sky. Like Santa Fe. It's never been my cup of tea. I thought it was boring: Violins and more violins, scratchy strings, will they never cease? After a electric concert last night, I may be a convert. Chamber music is intimate and crisp. People playing together. Looking at each other. Smiling, nodding, exchanging secret and knowing glances. Relationships.

What is it about travel that wakes me up? When I am away from home, every book on the shelf of that fascinating little independent bookstore is calling my name. I become infatuated with ideas and niches of knowledge that might otherwise bore me to tears in my routine life. That life often doesn't seem able to contain theories of cognition, Jung, or analysis of the Supreme Court in the same way I seem to be able to find space for them away from home.

I"m sitting in the Plaza on a park bench, surrounded by families walking, leathered old men in cowboy hats, grungy hippies, rich retired folk, and a healthy smattering of odd men (and women) out.

I am alone and I like it. Carl and I had lunch at my favorite place, The Blue Corn Cafe. I cheated and had yummy corn chowder. After a joint long visit to that fascinating little independent bookstore (Collected Works), CJ went home to sit on the balcony and read, while I wandered the streets.

Next time, the bookstore comes LAST on the wander, as I had to lug a 15 lb tome entitled "Women's Letters: America from the Revolutionary War to the Present" all over town that I absolutely HAD to have. Will it seem as compelling to me when I get it back to Oak Park?

Sometimes it seems that my thirst for knowledge is drowned in Oak Park, inundated by life's effluvium, aka all the crap I have to know to run the family life. But much of that is about to change, with Annie heading off to college in a month. Who knows how I'll change with it.

"Women's Letters" will probably still intrigue me after I've lugged it home. Sounds a lot like chamber music to me: relationships and connection and history. Thoughts to explore that are both new and connected to what was.

Liz