Book Tour to Joplin, MO (Days 2-3)

Tuesday, September 29, 2026
5:33am Wake up. Facebook. Temp 63F.
6am Double check that you can't take the flight to Chicago from the Joplin airport instead of driving an hour south to Northwest Arkansas (layover too short to make the connection to Pittsburgh).
6:15am Workout.
7am Breakfast. 
8am Do some remote patient care. Temp 64F.
11:45am Cross the parking lot to the Cheddar's Scratch Kitchen for chicken pot pie for lunch. Temp 84F.
12:30pm Catch ride to campus. 
12:55pm Meet with the University president.
1:20pm Driving tour of downtown Joplin. Yes, THAT Joplin, MO, site of the costliest tornado in US history that killed 161 people and left a mile-wide swath of destruction through the center of town in 2011.
1:45pm Stop at The SalTea Sloth for fancy iced tea. Temp 83F.
2:05pm Arrive at Joplin Mineral & History Museum.

Grease monkey cans!

Above: rocks that glow in black light.

Below: "If It Can't Be Grown, It Must Be Mined" -- including something take goes in the filling of Twinkies (?!)

Above left: Junge Baking Company display case.

Above right: One of a series of Godey's Lady's Book plates that tell the story of a nun. In this one, "She decides to die in spite of Dr. Bottles." (Dear reader, she did not die--at least, not then.)

Above: antique furniture; below: hand-made paper dolls.

The National Cookie Cutter Historical Museum is just an alcove with changing exhibits, but it reminded me of nothing so much as the Salt & Pepper Shaker Museum in Gatlinburg, TN.

Above: someone's private collection of tricycles and pedal cars, on loan; below: period image of "The Goat," which is reportedly the first motorized fire-fighting vehicle in the country (1906).

Above: Bonnie & Clyde 1) were fashionable and photogenic and 2) had a shoot-out in Joplin in 1933.

Finally, there was a whole room devoted to Route 66, which runs through Joplin on its way to Tulsa, through Phoenix, eventually to Los Angeles/Santa Monica.

3:45pm Stop at hotel to pre-pack and grab lecture materials. Temp 85F.
4:20pm Find a comfy spot in the honors and global student lounge to review lecture.
6pm Give public book talk to 61 people. (Recording still pending.)

7:28pm Head to dinner at Wilder's Steakhouse with 3 historians, 1 literature scholar, and a biology instructor.
9:39pm Close down the restaurant. Temp 74F.
10:11pm Lights out. Temp 73F.

Wednesday, September 30, 2026
1:02am Too hot.
2:04am Too cold.
3:12am Not yet.
4:15am Alarm.
4:30am Check out and wait for ride to airport while "Country Roads" unironically plays on the hotel speakers. Temp 74F. 
5:58am Clear security. Stop by the Crystal Bridges mini art gallery. Temp 70F.

Above: Irwin Hoffman (1901-1989), Lace Makers, Puerto Rico (1944)

Below: Jean Bales (1946-2004), Untitled (1970s-80s)

6:38am Take window seat 15F. Process photos for my blog and do patient work.

8:40am Touch down at O'Hare. Raining. Hello, Block I in the terminal! Temp 64F.

9:26am Assume window seat 11F. Discover there is no wifi so you can't prep charts for afternoon clinic. 😤 Play Tetris and then pivot to outlining another article due by the end of the year.
10:am Finally take off from Chicago.
12:37pm Land in Pittsburgh. Pick up bag and eat leftovers in car while driving to clinic. Temp 72F.
2pm See patients.
4:42pm Leave clinic ASAP to get a snack before writing notes and signing paperwork. Temp 76F.
7:15pm Reunite with Dear Husband over dinner at the local watering hole. Temp 70F.

10:15pm Time to drop into bed! Temp 65F.

Labor Day on the water, 2026

On Labor Day Monday, I got up early and found my way to the 24-hour gym in Dennison, where I worked out and then walked back in the early light. By the time I had showered and dressed, breakfast had been delivered. We ate out on the patio and then relaxed on the lower bunk/daybed until it was time to go to lunch. We again had to be flexible but managed to find a Mexican place that was both open on the holiday and served really excellent food (El Rey). The original plan had been to check out Uhrichsville's municipal water park, but online research before we left showed that it had opened late and closed early; a Facebook post referenced human feces on the water slide. Hard pass. Instead we drove to Atwood Lake Park Beach. We had worn our bathing suits, but the air temperature was a little lower than ideal for swimming, so we read / dozed / watched the scenery around us. It was perfect. 

For dinner we drove into New Philadelphia, where we watched sports while we ate at Broadway Brewhouse, then took a stroll around downtown to enjoy the nice evening and some of the public art.

After another peaceful night alone in our train car, we had an easy morning of working out, showering, packing, brunching at Timi's Cafe, and then driving back to Pittsburgh. I'm glad we made the time for an extended stay, because it was so relaxing to have some real time away from our usual labors.

On a Saturday in June

On a Saturday in June, we celebrated and natural and man-made beauty with two activities: a musical nature walk and a museum visit. Tomorrow is the summer solstice, so in the morning we gathered with the East End Song Studio at Nine Mile Creek* Trail to sing, to play movement games and circle dances, and use our imaginations. We set off like treasure hunters with a hand-drawn map. *The other side of the road, leading off the larger parking lot, is the Nine Mile Run Trail--easy to confuse!

I catalogued the different colors we saw: orange, white, periwinkle, and purple flowers; orange and blue butterflies or moths; and dragonflies with electric blue or green bodies. And of course, many shades of green. The creek even smelled like moss--a very green smell.

Jett’s programming appeals to children of all ages, including an elderly man named Pete who was walking the trail and joined in for one of them. Then we had brunch under the trees, and the cool green-ness of it all reminded me of nothing so much as the Central European hygienic habit of “forest bathing,” except we were fully clothed.

Next Dear Husband went to church to play a wedding, and I went home to do this and that. We reunited in the late afternoon at the Frick Museum, where we met a friend who has lived in Pittsburgh for a quarter century and had never been before. Our object was the opening of a traveling exhibition from the Brooklyn Museum of Art on French modernist painters.

Sold as "French Moderns: Matisse / Renoir / Degas," we saw works by Paul Cézanne, Marc Chagall, Camille Corot, Gustave Courbet, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Henri Matisse, Berthe Morisot, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Auguste Rodin. Also Gabriele Münter, I think the only female painter, who had lived a couple of years in Koblenz(?), the village our guest is from. The style of the paintings and sculptures included realism, impressionism, post-impressionism, symbolism, Fauvism, cubism, and surrealism, spanning the century from the 1850s to the 1940s. 

Goustave Courbert's The Wave was one of my favorite paintings, because it reminded me of one of my favorite works of glass art, a solid hunk of clear glass that nevertheless gave the feeling of movement.

I feel as though I have seen a similar vita in Frick Park, with a high path overlooking a tree-filled valley and buildings in the distance.

This one was large and stunning in person. The fact that you can tell the artist painted her left arm multiple times to get the angle right gives the painting a sense of movement.

I thought the curator(s) had done an excellent job choosing and staging the works so that we could appreciate multiple landscapes together, portraits (backlit peasants in fields, humble figures rich and poor, full-length middle-class icons), still lifes (including a painting of a basket of freshly caught fish, still bloody from having the hooks removed), and another set of portraits they entitled “Bodies” that mostly consisted of nude female bathers. 

Left: a Cardinal smelling flowers--the level of detail without visible brushstrokes was captivating.

Right: The Philosopher. reading a newspaper. He was displayed amid bathing women. I think the only other nude male was a half-life-sized bronze by Rodin made after the Franco-Prussian War.

As a historian, I find it valuable to be familiar with the culture of the time that I study, and attending an exhibit such as this helps me recalibrate my mental timeline of. I/We? have a tendency to think of modernity coming with the world wars in the 20th century, but artists were already challenging norms and perceptions in the second half of the 19th century. 

Before the museum closed, we sped through a couple of the free, permanent-collection galleries, although these are updated with some regularity. For instance, I don't remember seeing this peeved St. Catherine of Sienna with her  tortured expression before.

I was tickled by the juxtaposition of the painted wig on the left and the photographed "wig" of shaving cream on the artist's daughter on the right.

Magnificent composition of the painter's studio, in front of a room filled with ceramics:

Then we dodged the raindrops back to our cars and reconvened at a local French restaurant to eat and catch up. It was a wonderful way to celebrate the midpoint of the year.