Beans and Apples

The trip between Maine and PA was bookended by a couple of interesting septuagenarians we think should someday meet. The first, whom we met in Boston, was my friend Meghan’s landlord and downstairs neighbor George Jovellas. George is an artist and has an incredible old studio behind the house where he keeps his paintings and a lot of other random stuff. He’s really a good painter and from what it looks like is an institution of sorts in Arlington, which is just northwest of the city. After a tour I asked if he was interested in shooting a portrait. He readily agreed and quickly decided that putting on his bowler hat and holding a giant fish would spruce it up a bit. I have to agree. The second was Erinn’s grandmother, with whom we stayed in New Brunswick. She’s not pictured here, but her living room is. Like George, she has the knack for collecting things. She’s a lot more organized though. In between those encounters we made a trip to Walden Pond, and the East Village, where during our 3-hour visit we had an encounter with Barack Obama’s motorcade, which shut down Bleecker Street as he made his way back from lunch with (we believe) Bill Clinton. He was in town to make an address on financial regulation at Federal Hall on the one-year anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers. I got a pretty lame photo of his car going down the street, but I did get a slightly better one of a bunch of police milling about after the event had passed. It’s incredible the amount of preparation and resources that go into something as simple as a lunch meeting when POTUS is involved. The streets were shut down for a full hour before he came down the street and people had been there standing guard on the street corners since the night before, according to a police officer we talked to. He also complained that he’s been doing this duty for presidents for years on their various trips to the Big Apple, but has never actually gotten to see the president, as his job is to face the crowd. Those photos are after the jump.