Boston remains glorious, but it's not at my fingertips anymore

The Huntington Avenue entrance to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston

My wife Liz and I love Maine, where we have lived for close to 30 years. But there are times when I do miss my home state of Massachusetts, and yesterday was one of them.

Liz and I headed down to Boston Wednesday on a day trip, which was more of a production than we would have liked. We boarded the dogs Tuesday afternoon, and lined up people to care for our cats and chickens while we were gone. The alarm clock went off at 3 a.m. Wednesday so we could leave the house by 4 o’clock and drive down to Portland in time to catch Amtrak's 5:25 Downeaster to Boston. (Like Sheldon Cooper in CBS' The Big Bang Theory, I love trains. And there the similarity ends.)

The train ride was pleasant and uneventful, although we pulled into Boston’s North Station an hour behind schedule. That cut into the amount of time we could spend at the Museum of Fine Arts, especially because we had decided to walk the several miles from North Station to the MFA.
 
The MFA is one of America’s premier art museums, with nearly 450,000 works of art. "We welcome more than one million visitors each year to experience art from ancient Egyptian to contemporary, special exhibitions, and innovative educational programs," the MFA says on its web site.

The museum is so vast that we didn’t even have enough time to work our way through the relatively new Art of the Americas wing, which has 53 galleries containing art from the pre-Columbian era through most of the 20th century. Think about that number for a minute. That’s not 53 galleries in the museum as a whole . . . it’s 53 galleries in the American wing alone!

We spent so much time enjoying the work of John Singleton Copley, Gilbert Stuart and John Trumbull that we had to leave the rest of the American wing, and most of the museum as well, largely unexplored. By late afternoon we were wending our way back to North Station for a 2 1/2-hour train ride to Portland, followed by an hour-long drive to our home in Augusta. It wasn't until this morning that we were able to retrieve the dogs and bring them home.

As we sat at a Boston cafe Wednesday enjoying an afternoon snack, I fondly recalled my years as an undergraduate living in Boston an eternity ago. I often went home to central Massachusetts on weekends in those days, but when I did stay put in Boston, I spent many a Saturday morning at the MFA. One of the world’s greatest art museums was a 10-minute walk from my apartment, so I was free to hang out with John Singleton Copley on a whim, with no exhaustive - or exhausting - logistical gyrations.