I come from a very arty family. Or, as we say in Massachusetts, "ahh-ty." My mother is a painter, my father a classical composer. I grew up immersed in fine arts and classical music, to the point where it took the place and the intensity of religion in my upbringing. Despite my youthful deviations from orthodoxy, and my current excursions into graphic novel heresy, I have never renounced the faith. So, when I return home, it is to a world of devotion and dedication worthy of a secular monastery. There are musical and artistic "saints," and sermons from mom and dad about high culture and art, as well as re-affirmation of the embattled and special nature of the faith community, surrounded by a vast polluted multitude of cultureless, invincibly ignorant heathens.

I've just finished celebrating my father's eighty-fifth birthday. Despite his protestations, he really is an important figure in American classical music, a part of the history of American music that includes people like Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein. The Boston public radio station, WGBH, played some of his music on his birthday, and there was a splendid concert of his music on April 29 at the arts center in Natick, Mass. Father even played some of his own piano music, short pieces which are newly composed. He's still writing music at 85 years old! It should happen to all us "creative" types! You might still be able to access the "event details" if you type "Harold Shapero" into the "search" box on the NatickArts site.

During the week I helped my mother get her studio ready for an "open house." The studios are right across the street from the performance center. I framed pictures and repaired frames, then hung the paintings on the walls in proper rows. An "open house" is where artists invite local art-loving folks to visit them in their studios on a Saturday afternoon. The artists sit there and socialize, offer tea and cookies, and talk about their work if they are asked to. My mother graciously sat in the studio receiving guests all afternoon. I was there, too, showing off one of my own paintings, the Klee/Kandinsky affair which I mentioned in my previous post. The birthday party, concert, and art show was a three-day orgy of socializing and meeting old friends and relatives and giving gifts and eating. I'm worn out from all this hard work… but not as much as my folks are. Time to rest up.

I had my own art to take care of, too. This June will by my thirty-fifth high school reunion. I am class of 1970 at Dana Hall School in Wellesley, Mass. I have been persuaded by a strong-willed classmate to show my art at a reunion group art show which takes place in the very same gallery in which I had my graduation show back in 1970. I hope I am at least somewhat better as an artist now. I brought a selection of my originals to Dana Hall during last week, in fact on the same day as my father's concert. (VERY busy week indeed.) It was the first time I had been back at my old school for perhaps twenty years. Dana Hall is a ritzy girls' prep school, originally started as the prep school for Wellesley College. Without going into too much detail, I'll just say that despite my parents' hopes for me, I was not happy there nor did I do well as a student. So revisiting this school for me means returning to the very same sites and classrooms of my youthful failures, humiliation, and social incompetence.

The 1970 alumnae show will be on display all the way through May, and will be visited by returning alumnae on reunion weekend which is in early June. I'll be up there for that weekend, and will meet many of the girls-now-ladies whom I fought with or schemed with or whined with during my high school days. I visited a math classroom while I was there. It was empty except for a young female teacher about half my age. On the blackboard was a polynomial equation and one of those detestable word problems which were the bane of my existence when I was struggling in school. I had that horrible feeling again, that I could not solve the word problem. I didn't solve it, nor did I solve the polynomial equation. I would have to go back to my notes and references to remember how to solve the word problem. If I had been a cocky little physics kid, I would have solved it correctly right there and then, with a smirk at the teacher.
I brought my physics books with me. There weren't more than a few minutes during any day to work on it, but I tried anyway, 'cause I can't live without it. I am using a very introductory text called "Physics Made Simple" by Ira M. Freeman. This is not the kind of text that a young Julian Schwinger would use. But it is helpful to me. It introduces me to very basic concepts which I can then explore more fully in my other texts. I have now been formally introduced to the concepts of work, energy, kinetic and potential energy, and power. I need all the energy I can get.

I managed to get back to Cambridge a second time during this whirlwind trip, and along with a friend I revisited the old house where I spent ten of my Cambridge years. The white physics building I mentioned in the previous post has been switched to engineering. A great big computer center building has been built right next to it, while in the back, where the cyclotron and parking lot used to stand, a huge new science building is under construction. The high energy physics department is now housed in a historic nineteenth-century house which was transported in its entirety from another location. It's right on the same street where I used to live. It looks kind of small to be a whole department's headquarters, so maybe it is just temporary until the slick new science building is done. The "radioactive" maple tree in front of the old physics building is gone. There is a small empty patch in the front grass area where it used to be. Maybe the radiation was just too much for it, or more likely, all the construction around it disturbed it too much and it succumbed to the stress of all the changes.

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