Another day

Little to report, a meh day. Weather cool in the morning with some sun, milder (11C) in the afternoon but cloudy with rain reportedly coming. I'm not going out this aft - although rain has yet to materialize.

I ran in the morning. My man Fred Douglass's career has taken a bit of a backseat in recent passages of David Blight's biography. His personal life has been front and centre. 

We're in the immediate post-war years. His kids are a constant headache. None of the grown sons - Louis, Charles and Fred Jr. - has managed to become economically independent. This is possibly because even educated, intelligent blacks - or perhaps especially they - are thwarted by the deep-dyed systemic racism of the day. Or possibly that they have been both spoiled by their relative affluence and stunted by living in the shadow of the great man. It's hard for Douglass given that he has been preaching self-reliance to blacks in his writings and speechifying.

Meanwhile, the sons are at war with their sister, Rosetta, and her husband, the former slave-turned-gardener-turned- son-in-law. The boys think their brother-in-law is no good and that he and their sister are hogging the hand-outs from papa, and angling to get more. It's an ugly business.

Douglass's long-lost brother, sold from Maryland to an estate owner in Texas, now freed, arrives on his doorstep, with family. They are strangers to Douglass, but he takes them in. The man, not surprisingly, has been scarred by slavery and cannot adapt to freedom and the north. He and his family are installed in a small house, specially built for them on the grounds of the Douglass's Rochester home. They eventually up-sticks and head back south.

And then there's Ottilie Assing, the emigré German journalist and activist who has been his "intellectual confidante" and career help-meet for many years. She is infatuated with Douglass and deludes herself he will eventually leave his wife, Anna, and go to Europe with her. She still spends summers at the Douglass's Rochester home. Blight cannot fathom how the two women could have co-existed in the same home. 

And then catastrophe strikes the family. The buildings on the Rochester estate burn to the ground, along with the extensive gardens and orchards Anna has spent 20 years cultivating. The family in residence - not Douglass himself who now lives part-time in Washington - escape unharmed, but much else is lost.

Douglass has been angling for some kind of government position with the Republicans while maintaining his indefatigable  public speaking schedule - needed to earn money to support his extended family. He also takes on another black newspaper, based in Washington, employing his sons, and Assing, to help.

I confess that if I were reading this book instead of listening to it, I would have given up long ago. It's so-o-o long. I still have almost a third to go. But the writing and story-telling are masterful and the research exhaustive and interesting. And listening, especially while exercising, when my mind is otherwise unengaged, is a lot easier than reading. So I'll keep on with it.

*

I finished mining the winter 2012 pictures. We certainly saw a lot. Here are Caitlin and Karen at the Spanish Steps - which I think I read recently you were no longer allowed to sit on.

We saw lots of museums, including the Vatican museum, which has so much Roman and Rennaissance-era statuary that they can line empty hallways with them. It also has the Bramante spiral staircase. The original was built in 1505. This one - fairly impressive in its own right - is a modern version, built in the 1930s.

We also went to churches. Can't remember which this is, but the frescoes are pretty spectacular.

After Rome, we went home. My nephew Mike's wedding was in June. I snapped this picture of a pensive Caitlin in the cottage we rented in Grand Bend for the event. I know I shouldn't brag, but she really is a lovely-looking young woman.

And then in July, we drove to New York to meet Caitlin. She was back over on a one-week fellowship at a Yale University facility in Connecticut devoted to the study of British Art - but would stay with us in New York for a week before she went there. We rented a flat in Brooklyn. On one of the first days, we walked across the Brooklyn bridge and back.