About

I lived in the United States in my twenties. I didn’t see any of it.

I studied fine arts. I looked at paintings, at buildings, at history. In art history class, I learned about Sargent. Madame X — the portrait that scandalized the Paris Salon. I wrote it down when the professor changed the slide. I forgot it when the exam was over.

Back then, I didn’t have the room. Not emotionally. Not physically.

A long time passed. I came back. This time was different. There was room — emotionally, physically.

That’s when it started.

I walked into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Stood in front of a portrait. Sargent. The name from the textbook. But this time it was different. The painter who had caused a scandal in Paris and crossed the ocean to America — now standing in front of Boston’s greatest collector. And then, in another city, another museum — the same brush, in front of another wealthy man’s wife. The name I had written down was suddenly alive, moving.

I walked across the Harvard campus and stopped in front of Widener Library. A library built and donated by a mother in memory of her son, who died on the Titanic. Her family name was Elkins. On the way home, I looked again at the name of the neighborhood next to where I live. Elkins Park. A name I had passed every single day.

I went up One Summit. It was the Vanderbilt Building. A few days later I stood in front of the Whitney Museum. The person who founded it was Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Inside, a sculpture she had made herself.

I hadn’t gone looking for any of it. It was just there. All of it, connected.

The coincidences began to accumulate. At some point they stopped feeling like coincidences. As if it had all been there from the beginning — and I simply hadn’t been ready to look.

So I started writing.

Serendipity Gaze is a travel essay blog about walking through the United States and writing down what I find. History, art, architecture, and the forces that made this country what it is — the traces left behind by the people who shaped it. Not a travel guide. A record of things seen slowly, and late.

The name is Serendipity for a reason. These are things I didn’t go looking for. That’s the whole story.