It was good...

Our little spring break getaway. Good, in many ways. You know I have little love for Las Vegas, (http://andsewitgoes.blogspot.com/2011/07/and-then-there-was-las-vegas.html) but that is where we went, because that is what worked in a complicated scheme of meeting up with Ray's brother and our sister-in-law, with whom we have spent far too little time of late and with whom we wanted to be. It was Las Vegas by default.

There is the gambling, and there is the bizarre sense of unreality. Both offend something in me that admires truth and honesty, but getting beyond that is not, I found, such a stretch. Waiting, on our first day there, for Roy and Jamie to arrive, Ray and I made our way to the Bellagio art gallery to see a beautiful exhibit, on loan from the Boson Museum of Fine Art, called Painting Women—paintings of and by women. My favorite painting—"Open Window" by Elizabeth Paxton. 

After, a latte on the veranda—sunshine, birds flitting about and morning peace seemed quite perfect. 

The next day, the four of us spent an amazing morning at Hoover Dam, that monumental edifice in the desert. Setting aside the truly astounding feat of building such a thing back in the depths of the Great Depression, one cannot help being taken by the sheer beauty of the thing—the elegance of the Art Deco design, the making of something both utilitarian and emblematic of our cultural aesthetic, not unlike the  pyramids or the great wall of China. 

Photos are inadequate to convey how truly monumental, how grand and astonishing and moving this place is. It filled me with a sense of the sometimes grandeur and purity of human endeavor and spirit.