Breakfast with the Brainiacs

TI began my day with a visit to the concierge desk, where, as is my wont, I asked for a local running map. They handed me a small colorful card, almost Tarot-like in its prediction of my fate. I was to run down Dartmouth Street to the banks of the Charles River, cross the Harvard Bridge, run by MIT and back over the Longfellow Bridge and find my way home. Nothing like having to run by the ominous chrome dome of genius at MIT before breakfast. On the Harvard Bridge I espied various markings of "Smoot." The duck tour guide had told us that many years ago the MIT geeks, so offended by the name Harvard Bridge for the route to their college, had taken some poor freshman of short stature, Fred Smoot (5'7") and laid him across the bridge, end to end, again and again until they could measure the bridge in "Smoots" thus marking their territory and claim to the bridge. The Smoot is a measurement in use to this day, or so said our duck tour guide Shakespeare. My husband says you can never believe anything any tour guide ever says. The bridge made a believer out of me.

Harvard admissions office

Not having had our fill of egghead, we set out to Harvard for breakfast. Egghead was not on the menu, but Lina chose eggplant for her sub..okay we were a little late for breakfast. I went to Harvard Summer School in 1987, so it was familiar but still dauntingly impressive.  I saw so many tromping, troubled Ivy hopefuls marching their way through the orientation tours that I had an uneasy little flashback about the summer of our college tours. (See Washingtonian article below.)

Courtesy of Edward Perry Warren

Next up on the culture dish was the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The Warren WASP lines run long and deep here in Boston and I went in search of the Greek artifacts donated by Edward Perry Warren, an antiquities collector of some renown, and the man who helped my grandmother furnish her Portland house, and eventually my house. We eat dinner at a 16th century refectory table good old EP selected for her in England. And in the museum section on the ancient world we found a few of his finds. We were also delighted to come upon a Sargent portrait of another famous distant relative, Mrs. Fiske Warren. So my sliver of Boston Brahman offset the humbling at Harvard and the MIT mystique that had so colored my morning.

Headed to the North End tonight for some real Italian cooking. That means another morning outing to run off the ravioli.

Boston at our feet-the view from our room.