Well, I’ve been a little remiss on blogging this trip. It’s now Friday, and I started this entry on Tuesday. We’ve been eating later than normal and then walking off our desserts, so I haven’t had time before bed to write, which is normally when I do this. Read on, gentle reader, with my apologies for a summary rather than a blow-by-blow account of our trip to the Low Country.
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As I figured would be the case, on Monday, several of the guys in the group wanted to visit the slave museum and go to a plantation. I was not among them.
I know I’ve discussed this before on the blog, but I don’t quite seem to have my finger on it, so I keep coming back to it to try to understand. I am not a person who is interested in—to put it uncharitably and possibly unfairly—clinging to the past. So many of my friends, want to keep old furniture because “it’s a family piece” or tour historic sites and buildings. I’m just not interested. I don’t think it’s because I don’t care. Rather, I think a few different motivations keep my focus forward.
For one thing, I feel like I can learn the lessons of the past without reliving it or immersing myself in it. And sometimes, reliving it is too visceral. I don’t want to be—and don’t think I need to be—in a slave cabin to know that the institution is a stain on human history, and to be there is, to me, an unnecessarily painful reminder of the events but also, to some extent, how powerless we can be to stop injustice.
I also feel that for me, tours have a tendency to turn historic sites into amusement parks. Well-placed trash cans, souvenir shops, docents repeating the same information every hour on the hour to a new set of faces. It’s too packaged for my taste. I have long been like this in many venues. My favorite classes in grad school were those with just a handful—three to five—students. We could talk with our professor and among ourselves rather than be talked at while we took notes. Those are the situations in which real learning happens—at least for me.
I’ve also never liked being reminded of lives that were so full of struggle. That sounds bougoise when I write it down. Perhaps a better way to say it is that I find it depressing to read about ways of living that, to me, seem miserable. Thoughts of churning butter and shoeing horses and weaving fabric and cinching oneself up in uncomfortable clothing and living in dust and dirt all day every day depress me. I suppose in 200 years, my life will be equally depressing to read about.
Finally, I harbor a particular dislike for American history before World War I. Without a doubt, some noble ideas were born in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America, and some wonderful literature was written, but when I think of colonial America and the early United States, what I think mostly of is religious puratinism and conservatism and what today we might call intolerance. I suppose having grown up gay has made me particularly sensitive to the tendency of humans to use religion to stratify society. I find it hard to have a lot of respect for the vast majority of Americans in the early decades of this country and the society they built because I feel like they would have had little respect for me or mine.
Maybe in the end, I just feel too disconnected from pre-WWI America. Anyway, enough of that.
As I started to say, four of the guys wanted to do historical tours, but I begged off. Mark was a little on the fence, but in the end, he decided to stick with me and spend the day gallery hopping. We hit probably 20 galleries and saw lots of beautiful things—all out of our price range, unfortunately. Some of the notable galleries were the Ellis-Nicholson Gallery, the Meyer Vogl Gallery (I particularly liked this one), and Reinert Fine Art & Sculpture Gallery, though there were many, many more. And I bought a hat. It’s a straw, pork-pie kind of thing. I’m sure it looks dumb on me—as most hats do—but it keeps the sun off my balding spot and my ears. I’ll try to add a photo of it when I get one.
Monday night, we ate dinner at Blossom. It was a little fancy for my taste, but I did okay. The nicest thing was that our food was hot, which doesn’t seem to be a big thing here. Several of our meals have been luke warm, at best.
The next morning, four of us lollygagged while James and Tom sat through a sales pitch for the resort co-op to which Alex and Dan bel0ng and that we’ve been calling home for the last week. The talk was supposed to be 90 minutes, but at two hours in, James texted to tell us that no end was in sight and that we should go to brunch without them. We wandered over to a place we’d seen the day before called Another Broken Egg. We didn’t realize it, but it’s a chain doing only breakfast and lunch. Our waitress was fun and nice, and the food was adequate, but they were out of several stock items—like yogurt—and their espresso machine was broken, so we had to suffer through several disappointments. And, as seems to be the theme up to this point, the food was barely warm (in contrast to the restaurant, which was freezing).
Mark seemed especially bothered by the cold—unusual for him; he’s usually complaining about the heat—and was developing a sore throat. After lunch, he declined walking around and went back to the room to rest. He ended up developing a nasty, though short-lived, cold that sidelined him for the rest of Tuesday and all day Wednesday.
Being the compassionate soul I am, I told Mark I’d check on him later and wandered off, care-free, to a fun day shopping along King Street with the rest of the gang. (Seriously, though, Mark told me to go on. He was just going to sleep, and there was nothing I could do anyway, so I might as well have fun. He could reach me if he needed anything.)
King Street near our hotel is populated with a lot of little, local shops and galleries. North of Market Street, however, and for many blocks—at least up to Calhoun Street—the stores are largely big national chains—West Elm, Sunglass Hut, Anthropologie, Banana Republic, and so on. There are some local shops, too, but it’s pretty obvious that the rent in this district is higher.
One thing that I found particularly interesting along King is the number of gentlemen’s clothiers. I can’t think of a single store in Columbus outside of a mall that is devoted entirely to men’s clothing from athletic wear to Sunday best, but I saw at least three of them on King Street. I also found a Goorin Brother’s Hat Shop, which was quite fun. I was thinking I’d buy a go-to-hell hat to supplement my pork-pie, but the one I most liked was not available in my size. (Really, I think I just wanted to buy something there. It was a cool store with friendly, funny salesmen whereas the place I bought the pork-pie was dangerously close to touristy.) Though I ended up not getting anything, two of the fellas did. I’m very good at spending other people’s money. Here’s Dan in his new chapeau taking a picture of some tourists in Forsythe Square in Savannah (more on that later).
Simple pizza for us that night (IHOP chicken soup for Mark) and then dessert at the wonderful, joyous, extraordinary dessert bar, Carmella’s. Carrot cake, lemon-blueberry cake, black-and-white cake, lemon bars, key-lime pie. Sigh. I had probably the second-best chocolate mousse I’ve ever had. (The first was at Thanksgiving brunch several years ago at the Carlyle Hotel in NYC; a high bar.)
On Wednesday, Mark was still under the weather, and Alex was doing laundry, so the rest of us walked up to get tickets to tour Fort Sumter. I am the only one who was not interested, so I won’t have anything to say about the tour except that I’m writing this in the resort courtyard while the boys are off on their adventure. The most interesting—perhaps that’s not a somber enough word—thing about the walk, though, was that on the way back, we walked by the Mother Emmanuel AME Church where Dylan Roof shot and killed nine people just for begin black. To be there at the site of such hatred was surreal not only for the emotional weight of the place but because I realized that, contrary to what I’d imagined (for no legitimate reason), the site of the shooting is right in the middle of town. The county education administration building faces the church across Calhoun Street. The shopping district is two blocks west. A large city park is on the west side of Mother Emmanuel. To see where the church is situated is to be reminded that hateful acts can happen anywhere, not just in the dark, out-of-the-way corners where bigotry seems most likely to fester unchallenged.
But again, enough of that. This blog is not intended as a treatise, but rather, an account of the trip to share with friends and family and to remind me when I’m old and demented what my life has been. This is a picture of a sculpture on the side of the aquarium next to where we bought tickets.
On Wednesday night, Mark joined us for dinner a very nice steak house called Burwell’s with a knowledgeable and friendly server (anyone who can take James’s ribbing has to be friendly), but he skipped and the ghost tour, which was billed as the Dungeon and Cemetery tour. We didn’t spend much time in a cemetery, but we got a good taste of the dungeon under the Exchange and Provost building. We got a few ghost stories, but mostly history. The most interesting thing to me was learning that the cute little alley I’d stumbled on the day before was once known as “Duel Alley” or “Bloody Alley,” and was the site of numerous duels well into the nineteenth century.
By Thursday, Mark was feeling better and was able to join us on a day trip to Savannah.
Most of the Savannah trip was walking through the city squares and doing a bit of shopping and touring. I didn’t realize it, but In the area of Savannah where we spent the day, the city has reserved every third block or so as a city park or square. The largest, which spans several blocks, is Forsythe Square, but they’re all welcoming and cool with lots of shade trees, statuary, and fountains. It’s a really nice way to humanize a big city, and I wish Columbus had the foresight and political will to do the same kind of thing. Most of the shopping we did (other than getting ice cream, which we’ve done almost every day!) was to look at galleries. Because we were in a tourist area to start, I figured that most of the art there would be schlocky, and it was. However, as we were looking for a lunch place, we did stumble on Daedalus Gallery, which I thought was fantastic. I can’t seem to stop talking about it. I know the work there is not to everyone’s taste, but I thought it was gorgeous. It was, to me, the best overall collection of work I’ve seen on the trip (and I’ve seen some really good pieces is othwise pedestrian collections), and I would desperately like to bring home something from there as a memento. As is the case so often, though, the work I like the most is way out of my price range.
We got back in town just before dinner to find that pretty much every restaurant was booked. We decided to wander around and see if we could get lucky, and we ended up somehow getting a table for six at 5 Church. It was, again, too fancy for my taste, but I was able to get braided ravioli that was delicious, and the service that Tyler, our waiter, provided was spectacular. I’ve rarely had a waiter who was so attentive to my onion intolerance. The kitchen messed up my dinner twice by adding onions or chives, and he caught it before I ever saw the plate.
Mark, Alex, and I decided to walk off our dinner, so we wandered up King Street looking for a kids/toy store that would have some nice plush animals for our new grand-nephew, Everett. We found a place that we’ll likely return to today, and on the way back, we found what was described to us as a “true French bakery,” called Saffron Cafe and Bakery. We’re looking forward to hitting that tonight for dessert.
Tomorrow, we drive home, so this will probably be my final entry for the trip. Below are the photos I promised. (I found an Apple Store and bought the adapter I need to upload photos from my camera to Mark’s iPad.)
Charleston
Savannah
