Stargazer Wannabes

When I was a little girl, I wanted to go to the Erie planetarium very badly, but it was closed for a period of time during the peak years of my interest, so I never got there. In fact, at 53 years old, I've never been to any planetarium anywhere. Not one. But on Monday night, I did make it to an observatory: The Cincinnati Observatory, built on a hill in the Mt. Lookout neighborhood of the city in 1873 and now a National Historic Landmark.



I visited with my friends Robin and Wanda as a part of a non-credit class offered by the university called "Behind the Scenes at the Observatory." This was my designated new thing for October, so I was the instigator behind our outing. We weren't entirely sure what to expect from the class--we just wanted to see the building and, if the sky was clear, the stars. I'd driven Observatory Avenue through Hyde Park a hundred times or more over the years, but I'd never seen the observatory. Where was it? We were delighted to find out that the two building site is tucked away on little Observatory Place in a park-like setting, smack dab in the middle of a lovely residential area.



The class was taught by a former UC astronomy professor who also happened to live in the Mt. Lookout neighborhood where the observatory sat neglected by its owner, UC, back in the late 1990s. UC wanted to demolish the two charming brick buildings and sell off the land, but the neighbors banded together to form a non-profit that eventually raised enough money to buy and renovate the buildings. Now it's an historic landmark and a prime site of astronomy education in our area. My friend, Angie, tells me she's even attended a wedding held on the site. Heavenly!

I'm very sorry to report that Monday night was cloudy, so we never got to look at a single star: that was disappointing. The good news is that the professor was quite a storyteller, and while I can't even begin to recount the long and vibrant history of the Cincinnati Observatory, I will recount the quirky bits of the story that grabbed my attention. I should warn you: the things that stood out to me were mostly not about anything important. If you want to know the history of the institution, here's a website that tells it very, very well: http://www.cincinnatiobservatory.org/history.html

I learned that the Observatory moved a couple of times and that it was founded by a man with the fabulous name of Ormsby McKnight Mitchel. If I'm remembering right, he helped found an organization that helped raise money to build the Observatory and buy the big, super-expensive telescope, made in Germany. What grabbed my attention there? The wonderful name of his organization: The Society for the Propagation of Useful Knowledge. I think I stopped listening for several minutes after that, just spinning that name around in my little brain. I think a bad poet lives in my head, gathering names and stories and expressions for some future use. I tucked that one away for safe keeping. When I tuned back in, the professor was talking about someone's death--was it the delightfully named Mr. McKnight Mitchel? Alas, I'll never know, because I was too ridiculously tickled by the way our professor described the mystery man's cause of death: "He died from the rigors of wilderness," he said. What?! You can die from the rigors of wilderness? Well, of course you can, but it's the expression that grabbed me. I don't want to be morbid, but I am just dying to die from the rigors of wilderness now. I'm not sure what that entails, but I can tell you that the bad poet in my head is in love with the expression.

Professor Stargazer spent a fair amount of time talking about the Observatory's first home on top of Mount Ida. If you know Cincy, you know that there is no Mt. Ida. That's because John Quincy Adams was a huge supporter of the project, so the whole darned hill was renamed for him: Mt. Adams. Back to Ida, though. I have no real memory of who Ida was, but I will never forget that she is reported to have lived in the trunk of a huge Sycamore tree. I have to tell you, this story made me laugh so loud that Robin leaned over and said to me, "What?! It wasn't that funny." Not funny?! She lived in a freaking tree trunk! I don't know a darned thing about tree dweller Ida, but I have a sneaking suspicion that she might have died from the rigors of wilderness. I have to admit that I really hope she did.

At some point, we made it into the amazing telescope room, a round room with a humongous telescope and a roof with a pulley system that opens up a slot for the scope to point at the stars or planets or moon and that spins the whole metal cap of the roof so astronomers can follow the same spot in the sky all night long. Remarkable! I know I should be able to tell you amazing facts about astronomy here, but as usual, I was dazzled most by stories and words. First, a word. Scintillation. Who knew? Who knew there was this word to describe the way the fast variations in light make a heavenly body appear to twinkle--or make a super hot road appear to have moving heat waves hovering above it. Well, somebody knew that these things were scintillating, but I did not. I never could have imagined the final story that caught my attention either: that a depressed astronomer working alone one night hanged himself from the giant telescope on Mt. Lookout. Some believe his ghost haunts the building.

I enjoyed our night, though we all would have loved to have looked through one of those big telescopes. Luckily, there will be clear Cincinnati nights in the future. Now that I know where this little gem of a historic site sits, I'll be heading back. Here's our happy trio of stargazing wannabes:



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Downtown Cincy

I went to the downtown branch of the Public Library yesterday to grade papers with my friend, Wanda. We both needed a change of scenery and some peer pressure to get our load of work finished--or, in my case, started. I used to spend a lot of time down at the library. Back in the days when I was officeless, or when I had a stuffy, windowless office, I'd frequently end up at the library, my butt parked near some big window, to grade papers. When I was married and poor (I was a visiting faculty member and my husband was the director of the local Coalition for the Homeless, so we were fairly cash-strapped), we would make occasional day-long trips to the downtown library. We'd pack our lunches and spend the day reading and, alternately, wandering around downtown Cincinnati, window shopping. Now that I have a nice office with a wall of windows, I spend my grading time there, instead. It was nice to get back down there, though. Like many things, lately, it felt like some indicator of how much my life has changed in the last decade and a half. It also made me realize that I make poor use of my city.

Truth be told, Cincinnati might be just enough city for me. When I moved to the city in 1990, my younger sister used to refer to it as "the big city." I think I thought of it that way, too. Compared to my hometown, it is a big city, I guess. I don't think of Cincy that way now, but our drive through downtown yesterday on our way to the library made me realize that I just don't make good use of the great things we have here in town. There are a million and one cultural events that I don't attend, parks I haven't visited, restaurants where I've never eaten, and neighborhoods I've never wandered. In the stretch of a few blocks yesterday, I saw two new vibrantly colored murals painted on sides of buildings (one unfortunate one on the side of the Hustler store), a building stripped in red and blue and green and yellow that I swear I'd never seen before, advertisements for an annual book festival I've never attended, and at least a half a dozen new downtown restaurants. I need to get out more.

I say Cincy is just enough city for me, but maybe it's too much. Or maybe I just need to get my new thing butt in gear. If I lived in a city like Chicago or New York, would I do more? Get out more? Or would I just feel worse for missing a bigger, better list of events and opportunities? I have no idea. I asked Wanda that yesterday as we drove down Walnut street on our way to the library. She thought that maybe in a big city where we'd use public transportation to get around, we'd know about more events, walk by and visit more museums and parks, and see the city in ways we don't see it when we're driving. She makes a good point, and it's a point that makes me feel a little better about my Cincinnati self. If Cincinnati had better public transportation, I'd be a better Cincinnatian. It's an interesting theory.

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Truth and Beauty

I've been thinking about appearances lately. Physically appearance, that is. A couple of weeks ago, I changed my hair color from too-too-blond to something closer to my natural color, light brown. One of my former students manages the salon I go to, and I ran into her on the day of my appointment. I complimented her on her new hair color and said, "I like the new length, too." She looked puzzled and said to me, "Oh! You mean my hair extensions. Yeah, I had those removed." Hair extensions?! I had no idea. Then she apologized to me, "I'm sorry my face is so red. I just had a chemical peel yesterday." I guess I'm naive, but when I hear chemical peel, I think medical procedure, so I expressed alarm. "What's wrong?" I asked. "Are you okay?" Again, she gave me that puzzled look. "Everything is fine," she said. "Sometimes you just need to brighten up your complexion."

Really? Exchanges like this one make me feel like I wasn't issued the female handbook at birth or something. Do people really have chemical peels to improve their looks? Apparently so. I guess some chemicals on the face is no more extreme than the chemicals the hairdresser smeared all over my head to change my hair color. I wonder what else women do in the pursuit of beauty that I don't know about. I don't see any peels or hair extensions in my future, but I won't be going grey anytime soon.

One last story on the beauty front. I canceled my lit class last week to go to a conference, so my Thursday class didn't see my new hair color until yesterday. I'd forgotten about it, so I was perplexed by the fact that a couple of them were really scrutinizing me when I walked in. Finally, my student Jeff, a friendly 18 year old, asked me, " did you do something different to your hair?" I explained that I'd changed the color, and one of the women in the room said to Jeff, "Wow! Your girlfriend must love you." He didn't understand, so I explained that lots of women complain that their significant others (or men in general) don't even notice when they make dramatic changes to their hair, and that that makes them feel invisible. His comment to me must have made him seem like some kind of evolved man to the women in the class. "No!" Jeff said emphatically, "I never notice! This is the first time I've ever noticed anybody's hair." I don't know if he got it, but I begged him, " Do not tell your girlfriend about this. You CANNOT tell her that the first time you ever noticed the change in a woman's hairstyle was the day you noticed your 53-year-old professor's hair." No good can come from that.

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San Antonio

I added another state to my list of places visited last week: Texas. My friends Eric, Angie, and I presented the results of a qualitative study on the effect of pre-trip activities on the attitudes and experiences of study abroad students at a conference in San Antonio. The conference is a small one, and it felt like half of the attendees were from my college. The best part, though, was that my friend and former colleague, Heather, came down from her home in Austin to spend the weekend with us. The weekend was a nice mix of professional business and pleasure.

San Antonio is an interesting city. This was my first trip to the southwest, so it was a new thing for me to hear Spanish spoken so widely in a US city. The heat in October was a new thing, too. Eighty six degrees with very high humidity: that was a shock to the system after acclimating to the cool temps in a Cincinnati autumn. We adjusted by walking a lot. One of the first places we headed was to the river. I'd heard a lot about the River Walk before I went. The San Antonio River runs through town, and the city planners--or somebody--turned the banks of the narrow river in the downtown stretch into a long tree-lined stretch of restaurants and bars, all of them with charming outdoor areas to enjoy a little al fresco dining or drinking. The curving river looks like a serpentine canal. It's covered with stone foot bridges and lined with benches and gorgeous landscaping. The trees were just wonderful, some of them with massive trunks. I think the big ones were Cypress trees.








We had lunch at one of those restaurants along the River Walk, and the server made some fabulous guacamole right at our table!







On Saturday, after the conference was over, we did one of my favorite things: we visited a National Park site--or, more accurately, a National Historic Site--to do some sightseeing and park passport stamping. The San Antonio Missions are just lovely. Here's a little history from the NPS website on the Spanish missions in south Texas:

"For the Spaniards, the acculturation of the native peoples was a major means for securing their claim to vast lands in North America. With very few soldiers and settlers, Spain's claim to these areas in the face of encroachment by France and England, depended upon the success of the missions. Church and State were very closely linked, and the Spanish monarch granted various religious orders of the Catholic Church permission to found mission communities. Through instruction by these religious, communities of native converts were to emerge as part of an essentially medieval peasant society loyal to the crown on the frontier."

We visited two of the missions: Mission San Jose and Mission Concepcion. Here are some photos of Mission San Jose:





In it's early days, the entire mission would have been covered with a colorful geometric pattern, but that's almost totally gone now.




The front of the mission is carved beautifully.




Here's Our Lady of Guadeloupe:




There's some unfortunate carving in the soft stone and clay, though:




The inside of the Mission church was just lovely:




Of course the mission was more than the church. Here's the inside of a convent room on the grounds.







We even got to see a 15 year old Latina-American girl having her Quinceanera photos taken. The "Quince" is a right of passage celebration that ushers young Latinas from childhood to womanhood.


The next stop was Mission Concepcion, another beauty.






Here's an outdoor shrine on the mission grounds. I sat here and rested while my friends went off to do some geo-caching on the mission grounds. If you don't know what that is, see this site: http://www.geocaching.com/guide/




Here's my NPS gang:




And just in case you were thinking about taking Fido with you on your next trip to the missions, don't even think about it.




Of course, I was most eager to add some stamps to my National Parks passport.




We did some other interesting things in San Antonio. We saw the Alamo (the exterior of it, that is). There it is behind my colleagues!




We visited the bar where Teddy Roosevelt recruited the Rough Riders:






And we were delighted to discover a chalk festival right in front of our hotel on Saturday morning.












All in all, San Antonio was great. Plus, it was a new thing bonanza!





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Honey: Not So Sweet

There are a number of places in my neighborhood of College Hill and in the surrounding area that I've wanted to check out: a new textile store called Silk Road, some funky clothes stores down the hill in a neighborhood called Northside, a Greek restaurant up the hill in Mt. Healthy called Blu Blu. The list is a long one, and I'm not exploring very quickly. Last night, my sister, Nancy, was in town, so we checked one of these unvisited spots off of my neighborhood to-do list. We had dinner at Honey, a restaurant in Northside that is more fine dining then dive.

First, the positives. It was fun to catch up with my sister. We see each other on holidays and other family gatherings when I head to Erie, but it's been ages since she's been in Cincy, so that was great. We caught up on family news and talked about family history. I've lived far away from my family since 1985, and it struck me last night that I almost never talk to anyone who knows me prior to the mid-eighties. The other good thing last night was the food. I had a salmon and Chinese noodles dish with a spice red pepper sauce that was delicious--and big enough to have the rest for lunch today. Nancy had a burger and fries that looked gourmet and very tasty. The atmosphere was pleasant: the space is open and the seats are comfy.

The negative last night was the service. They might have been short staffed or maybe they had more patrons than usual. Either way, the service was very bad. We waited and waited and waited. Servers promised to be right back and then never came. Our wine order was mixed up, our bill was wrong, and we were charged for one of the complimentary desserts we were given to make up for the other problems. Pre-menopausal Sue would have had a grin and bear it attitude about the whole thing, but post-menopausal Sue did not. I won't be giving Honey a second chance, I'm afraid. That's the thing with the whole New Thing Campaign. Sometimes the new things you do are a mixed bag.

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Vows

My friend, Karen, complained to me recently that I don't blog enough. Since she's confirmed that I have at least one reader, this entry is for her.

A couple of weekends ago, Karen and her husband, Frank, celebrated thirteen years of marriage by renewing their vows on the roof garden of the spectacular Belvedere, a fabulous 1925 apartment building-turned-condos in the North Avondale neighborhood of Cincinnati. Karen and Frank own a condo in the building, and the roof garden on a late September afternoon was a perfect setting for the intimate ceremony.




The day was one of those breezy, golden days in early fall: blue skies and clouds just heavy enough to squat over the roof garden like big balloons. There were only twelve people at the ceremony, and that included the vow renewers.




The informal ceremony was just lovely. Their friend and neighbor, Richard read a poem, and then our friend, Wanda, read a poem by Ohio poet, James Wright. Karen and Wanda went to a James Wright festival several years ago, and Karen fell in love with Wright and the poem. Here it is:

JUST OFF THE HIGHWAY TO ROCHESTER, MINNESOTA

Twilight bounds softly out on the grass.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I think
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

Karen and Frank read their vows, and that was definitely the highlight of the ceremony. All those years ago, when they met, I don't think either of them anticipated that they would ever meet someone they would forge a life with, but they did. Both of them talked about their marriage in ways that let the ten of us in attendance see their love, yes, but also the most incredible support and acceptance they give each other. The things they expressed to each other seem rare to me--certainly worthy of celebrating.






After the vows, their friend, Barbara read a surprise poem--a delightful piece she wrote about the years she and her husband had spent with Karen and Frank as Belvedere neighbors and friends, and then I brought up the rear with a poem by e.e. cummings, the 20th century modernist. Here's the poem I read (it was an abbreviated version):

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)




After the ceremony, we went downstairs to their condo for a small reception. A friend and neighbor of the happy couple joined us then, rounding the number to an appropriate thirteen: thirteen people celebrating thirteen years. Perfect.



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