Thursday Mark suggested Cambridge, so we hopped on the T and headed to Harvard, aiming for the museum of natural history.
Let me just say: for not being enormously big, the Harvard natural history museum is fantastic. I could have spent a very long time there. (But, you know. Children. And also the parts that I wanted to see the most were not the ones the little ones wanted to see. So I made do.)
I have been to the London museum of natural history, and that one is pretty exciting in part because there are very famous specimens on display (Archaeopteryx! Darwin’s finches! Mary Anning’s collection! A dodo!) and this one has only a few such items and is much smaller. And I have seen a vast quantity of very cool paleontological specimens at the museum in Utah. But I never got the sense that having been to London and Utah had spoiled me for this one. It is a sparkling collection, both literally and figuratively. Just, well, perfectly curated.
We spent most of our time in here, for obvious reasons.
I wish that I could have returned with my two older kids, both of whom are focusing on biology this upcoming school year, and encouraged them to make a careful study of two particular exhibits. The glass models of botanical specimens, for my daughter who is about to study botany and also appreciates art. And the entire section devoted to the evolutionary tree (including more hominin fossils than I have ever seen in one place), for my son who’s about to spend a year on evolutionary biology. I just skimmed through it, but it’s a super exhibit.
Lots and lots of taxidermied animals, three big whale skeletons, and a stellar rock room. Honestly, this is at the top of my list for returning someday and spending the time I would like to spend.
I rewarded the little ones for their patience by buying them gift shop items: the Box of Polished Rocks for the 9yo, the Two Plastic Pteranodons for the 5yo.
On our way off campus we stopped at the Putnam Gallery, a tiny room which has some historical scientific instruments. This was kind of fun, but for this one I really was spoiled by London. When you’ve seen Joule’s own calorimeter and the clockworks that solved the longitude problem, what’s a few sextants?
On the other hand, the cyclotron console was kind of cool, if only because they preserved the little notes and comic strips taped up on the wall and the carryout menus tacked to the corkboard.
We had lunch at Legal Seafoods. I finally got my bowl of chowder, and a superior crab cake. There is lobster on the kids’ menu, but the younguns wanted macaroni and cheese and hot dogs.
And then we walked allllllll the way on Massachusetts Avenue to MIT, passing another Legal Seafoods on the way. We stopped at the small MIT museum, where there were only a few things to see, and then headed back with very tired children.
Mark and I went out later for another Italian dinner, including cannoli. Something I didn’t anticipate as much as I should have: how pleasurable it is to dine in a city that has a legitimate “little Italy.”
I went with cod puttanesca this time, trying to hit the perfect fusion of New England and Italian food. No pasta: cod on a bed of ethereal mashed potatoes, with the sauce deconstructed: thin tomato sauce, olives scattered about, anchovies draped over. Cod and potatoes go together like nothing else, and the light application of the strongly flavored elements of the sauce made it just about perfect.
Wine: Primitivo.
I generally think I am pretty good at picking wine to go with dinner, and this evening I applied a bit of critical thinking to the matter to decide if I am right about this.
I concluded: there’s this very nice feature of matching wine with dinner on your own. It requires three ingredients. If:
(1) you are disposed to think highly of your own skill; and
(2) you have at least a very basic level of competence, i.e., you have a general sense of what will go with red and white, sweet and dry; or you are capable of googling discreetly at the table; and
(3) the restaurant has already done most of the work by having a well curated wine list;
then you will harness the power of cognitive bias to enjoy your own wine pairings and feel good about yourself while you have a delicious dinner.
So, I basically can’t go wrong in the North End. QED.
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