My last full day in Chautauqua. Tomorrow we leave for East Lansing early in the morning, then Sunday morning I catch an 8:30 a.m. train to Chicago. After a long week of learning, relaxing, and reflecting, I’m ready to return home to the real world.
We woke up to another rainy morning. I decided it would serve me better to stay in bed than to walk in the rain to morning meditation. Kathy made us BLUEBERRY PANCAKES again! God bless her! After the kids left for club, Char and I relaxed with our coffee and our journals.
The morning lecture was given by Robert M. Franklin, president of Morehouse College. He told us a list of things he teaches his students: to be well read, well spoken, well traveled, well dressed and well balanced. He closed with an excerpt from a speech that Martin Luther King’s gave the day before he was killed, the “If I had sneezed” closing paragraphs. I counted 30 knitters.
During lunch I went to writing lecture by Clint McCowan called “The Hydrogen Atom of Fiction,” which it turns out is “setting,” which includes not just the geographical location but the general environment of the characters, like religion. I found this interesting because as I continue working on my novel, the characters’ religion, Catholicism, is becoming a bigger part of the story.
I decided to skip the interfaith lecture and instead hung out in the plaza. By the afternoon, the sky cleared and the sun was shining. I read more of the book Char loaned me on understanding men called “It’s a Guy Thing: An Owner’s Manual for Women.” I’m learning a lot about those bastards that I can’t live without.
We went blueberry picking in the afternoon. I picked about three and a half pounds so I’m going to have to find some creative ways to use them: blueberry pancakes (of course), smoothies, cobbler, pie. I’ll be eating blueberries the rest of the summer. Lots of antioxidants.
After blueberry picking, Char and I took the ferry to Bemus Point for dinner at the Italian Fisherman. We ate chicken fingers and Italian nachos (a sky-high pile of chips sprinkled with Asiago cheese, crumbled Italian sausage, tomatoes, banana peppers and green onions) while sitting on the floating dock, watching the sun go down, and drinking Margaritas.
We made it back to Chautauqua just in time for Jason Alexander’s show “Donny Clay Wants to Show You the Way!” He put on a great show. I thought it was amusing how his humor drove a lot of the old folks out of the amphitheater. The best line from the show was unscripted. Donny asked an audience member, “What do you do?......You drill what?......Oh, gas holes.”
We’re back at the apartment now getting ready to go to sleep. I’m sad to leave Chautauqua, but I know I’ll return some day. I didn’t work on my novel as much as I planned, but I wrote a daily blog, journaled every morning, and cleared my mind. There’s so much to experience here. I really wanted to take it all in. There aren’t many places on this planet that you can walk through a safe, gated community and hear the orchestra practicing in one amphitheater, the kids frolicking in the plaza, the opera singers doing scales from the practice huts, a renowned guest speaker giving a lecture in the open Hall of Philosophy, the Chautauqua Belle steamboat blowing its horn in the distance, all while grandma knits a scarf on a nearby bench. It’s a magical place, and I hope to be back soon.
For now, it's time to get back to reality.
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