Visiting Gettysburg, Pennsylvania Notes by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting Gettysburg, Pennsylvania Notes by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Getting to Virginia from Wisconsin required a lot of cross-country driving.  Laurent and I took turns at the wheel.

I drove in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Ohio while Laurent drove through Chicago, part of Ohio, and Breezewood (Pennsylvania).  The drive into Breezewood in the dark, up and down the mountains resembled a roller coaster ride.  Pennsylvania was a very beautiful state that I was discovering for the first time.

The landscape around the freeway began to become mountainous east of Cleveland.  The grass was so green, it reminded me of Ireland.

The homes in Pennsylvania have very high, rectangular roofs with brick chimneys on them at either end of the roof.  Rectangular porches made the homes seem even more symmetrical.  They all had planters full of geraniums.

We woke up to the fresh morning air in the mountains.  We read in our hotel literature that Gettysburg was just sixty miles away from Breezewood.  We set out for the famous battlefield on the U.S. Highway 30 for a jaunt through the mountains on a country road.

The first thing we noticed on our way to Gettysburg (Pennsylvania) was the Runaway Truck Ramps on the downside of the mountain grades.  Those runaway truck ramps made us very careful about control of our own car.

Along the way, we admired how people in Pennsylvania tended to their gardens with tulips and daffodils popping up everywhere.  Gardening is very much an East Coast and European pastime.  I yearned to have my own garden one day, too.

When we arrived at Gettysburg, we did the auto tour.  Most of the commemorative plaques that we read around the Gettysburg Battlefield were conciliatory towards the South, saying that the Southern soldiers were courageous.

There is a huge monument with General E. Lee on top of it that commemorates Virginia.  In typical European fashion, Laurent knew more about Gettysburg than I did.

Laurent remarked that Gettysburg was important, because it broke the morale of the South.  Pickett’s Charge and the Cupp’s Hill Engagements were key engagements in the Battle of Gettysburg.

By Ruth Pennington Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Visiting Napoleon and Josephine Sites in Paris and its Environs - A List Created by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting Napoleon and Josephine Sites in Paris and its Environs  - A List Created by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

There are many places that you can visit in Paris and outside it to learn about Napoleon and his wife Josephine Beauharnais:

Ecole Militaire

Napoleon was from a family of minor nobility on the island of Corsica.  He attended Ecole Militaire due to his minor nobility status (aristocracy with no money).  The elite military officers attended school at St. Cyr outside Paris.

Rueil Malmaison

This small château was the home of Empress Josephine Beauharnais – daughter of a rich French planter from the Caribbean.

She loved fashion and sometimes bought the same gown twice from unscrupulous salesman, who told her how good she looked in it.

Napoleon had a room at Rueil that looks like an army field tent.  He ate his meals standing up, so he could read while eating or examine maps or charts.

Josephine’s bedroom is wall-papered with lava red, textured fabric.  A large, round mirror is above the bed.

Her rose garden is open to the public.  There are fox hunts with French horn players in costume in the park next to the château sometimes.

Fontainebleau Château

(South of Paris)

Napoleon lived here and took over a suite of rooms that Louis XVI used (next to the Gallery of François 1er).

He could go through a hidden doorway behind a curtain from his bedroom to his private library.

Thomas Jefferson had a similar set up at his home in Monticello outside Charlottesville, Virginia.  Many castles do have secret doors, so Thomas Jefferson may have been familiar with them from his diplomatic work in France.

The winged staircase in back of the château is called  the “Escalier des Adieux” where he said farewell to his troops during one of his banishments.

Les Invalides

Many people take pictures of this spectacular gold-domed building from the Alexander III Bridge with rearing golden horses without really knowing what it is.

Les Invalides is a military hospital that is still in use.  Napoleons’s poryphory coffin stands on a high pedestal in a round room with the names of his most important battles engraved on the circular walls around it.

The Louvre

Jacques-Louis David’s historical paintings of Napoleon’s Coronation and Empress Josephine’s in the Louvre commemorate his contributions to French Civil Administration that are still in place today.

He crowned himself, because he was self-made.  He loved Egypt and commissioned furniture glorifying its virtues.  It was a stratified society with slaves, but everyone ate. 

Ancient Greece and the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire all had slaves as well.  Not everyone ate well in these civilizations, though.  Soldiers often had to pillage for food. 

The French do not suffer in silence, but if you mess up food, especially for young children – Redrum as the twins said in the movie The Shining will happen.

He also knew that Cleopatra was a Ptolemy (Greek), daughter of General Ptolemy.  She did not want to be mistreated by being dragged through the streets of Rome by Caesar Augustus as a way to end the 3,000 year old empire of ancient Egypt.  She committed suicide by letting herself be bit by an asp.  (Greeks still hate Italy to this day for treating a Greek this way.)

His archaeological team led by the archeologist Champillon brought back many treasures from Egypt and placed them in the Louvre, which you can still see today.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Touring New York City and New Jersey by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Touring New York City and New Jersey by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Madison (Wisconsin) is such a child-friendly city that I was happy to just stay home most of the time and take Florence out and do outings (mini field trips with her).

However, when I had the opportunity to do a cultural vacation in New York City with Florence, I jumped at the chance.  I began to do some research, so we would see a few key artworks at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Our hotel was located on the corner of 48^th Street and 8^th Avenue.  The streets in New York run East-West and the avenues run North-South.  We walked along 8^th Avenue when we arrived.

There are lots of little markets with produce proudly displayed out front in New York.  People like to eat well in New York City.  (Italian, Puerto Rican, and South Carolina legacies.)  We walked up to Columbus Circle and walked along Central Park.

We bought some ice cream cones and sat in Central Park eating them.  We returned by walking down Fifth Avenue.

We visited St. Thomas Church, which was splendid.  Nobody was there except for a small group, so we could walk around.

I bought a flyer about the Episcopalian faith.  We left and visited St. Patrick’s Cathedral.  It was packed for mass and had lots of milling tourists as well.  We joined the milling tourists.

Six-year-old Florence and I watched Spanish-language television.  I did not speak any Spanish at the time, but I thought the cockroach ads with operatic death scenes were really funny.

Florence and I watched Plaza Sesamo (Spanish-language Sesame Street).  We learned how to add and subtract in Spanish:

-Uno mas uno son dos.

-Dos menos uno es uno.

Spanish lessons came to an end when we had to take a French tour of town.

For dinner we went to Eddie’s, because I read that New York University students liked to eat there.  It was a good-food-at-a-reasonable-price spot.

When we went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I took Florence with me to see two paintings and would then let her play in the museum.

I had a map, and we soon found Velasquez’s Juan de Pareja and El Greco’s Toledo.  (Juan de Parja is the subject of a young teen book entitled I, Juan de Pareja: The Story of a Great Painter and the Slave he Helped Become a Great Artist by Elisabeth Burton de Treviño.)

Both paintings are important for Americans to see.  Juan de Pareja was an African slave dressed up in Renaissance finery as a courtier. (Painters were considered courtier artisans.)  Isabella d’Este of Italy also had African slaves. 

Slaves were dressed nicely to be in the castle and not as farm hands.  The same was true of the American plantations in the South.  (This difference in slave fashion was based on occupation and gave rise to the expression – in the house.)

The city of Toledo was important, because it was a center of learning in Spain for the Jews, Christians, and Muslims.  I explained the paintings to Florence and then went off to play “Magic Room” with her.

I closed my eyes and would let Florence take my hand and lead me from gallery to gallery.  In each new gallery, she would say, “Surprise!”

I would open my eyes and say things like “Wow. This is beautiful.  Tell me what is here.”

Florence would then lead me around showing me flowers, horses, dead birds, graveyards, and pretty people.

We had fun, especially when I made comments such as “That lace looks scratchy” when we looked at the portraits of the Dutch people, who founded New York.  Amsterdam Street is still the main thoroughfare of New York.  The Dutch are still in New York; they own all the Hudson River mansions that are featured in Architectural Digest magazine.

On another day, we went to see the Cloisters on the bus.  Going to places on the bus is one of the best ways to sightsee in a city.

It takes longer, but is more fun to do.  We bought bus passes and used them to go from the World Trade Center (it was still standing then) to the Cloisters.

The Cloisters Museum literally houses sections of medieval French abbeys.  I was gearing up for the post-visit comment-commute with my French in-laws:

“The Americans should really return what’s French to the French…”

To which I had my reply ready:

“Sure, we’ll do that once the French return all the Louvre’s Egyptian antiquities to Egypt, the Mona Lisa and the Raphaels to Italy (the Vatican has room), and all the Near Eastern antiquities to Iraq and Iran.”

We still had not made it to the Cloisters and were enjoying riding through Harlem.  We lived in Wisconsin at the time, and Florence asked, “Why are there so many Black people on the bus.”

I mimicked the Wizard of Oz and said, “We are not in Wisconsin anymore.”

Florence was satisfied with that answer, but the bus was laughing, including me.  Someone said, “Yeah, and Harlem sure as hell ain’t Kansas” and started hee-hawing really loud.

My in-laws asked what was funny.  I had to translate all the cultural subtleties in French, which made the bus riders laugh even more.  Someone even made a comment along the lines of, “Thank God, we have a Mage d’Oz interpreter on board.”

I knew they were making fun of the UN and said, “English, French, and Spanish can get you a six-figure admin or janitor job at the UN, which is union.”

Maybe I am not the angel of Harlem as in the U2 song, but I know my cheap tourism transportation got some well-educated people to add French to their Spanish and obtain decent employment in New York, who might not otherwise have had it.

New York has high educational standards and they do a good job meeting them with multicultural, multilingual, multiracial, multi sexual gender kids, reformed drug addict parents and reformed alcoholics, millionaires, suburbanites, and orphans. 

Maybe the nation should look at what New York State has done right to create highly literate and creative businesspeople with good lawyers despite flawed parenting.

I would like it if all neighborhoods had street cleaning, though, because respiratory diseases do float in the air with bacteria.

On our last day, we took the ferry to New Jersey and ate in a Greek restaurant there.  Florence thought the ferry was great and ran all around looking at all the scenery. She had sea legs in here genes.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Visiting Frank Lloyd Wright Sites in Wisconsin and other Activities with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting Frank Lloyd Sites in Wisconsin and others activities with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

I learned to look through the Madison (Wisconsin) newspapers everyday for fun things to do with children in the community.  Many of these activities were free or very inexpensive.

We went to many of these places on a regular basis, including:

Wisconsin Historical Museum

Frank Lloyd Wright Tour

Kids in the Crossroads Performing Arts Programs

Wisconsin Historical Museum

I took Florence to see the Native American exhibit at the Wisconsin Historical Museum, because the Shirley Temple movies she watched had negative stereotypes of Native Americans in them.

The displays have changed in the past twenty years, but I liked the putty figurines that depicted Native American life in Wisconsin by the Wisconsin River.

Florence wanted to play with the figurines.  I wished they sold play sets of the exhibits at the Museum’s gift shop.

Native American tribes differ culturally and linguistically from one another.  In Wisconsin, trading posts were the vehicle of exchange for goods between the French fur traders, who bought pelts for the fashion industry, and the Native Americans, who often bought cognac and dry goods.

The Museum’s website states that fishing, gardening, harvesting wild rice, and maple sugaring were some of the ways to make a living for the Ho-Chunk Nation.

The Ho-Chunk Nation according to their website occupied lands in Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Minnesota.  They are known as “people of the sacred language.”

Describing indigenous people and their culture is a different task, because genocide almost wiped the tribes out.

The tribes hid much information about their culture.  A good book to read about hiding culture, but still transmitting it to youth is entitled I, Rigoberta Menchu.  It is the autobiography of the Nobel Prize winner of the same name that was recorded by a French anthropologist.

The trip to the museum was not a cure for the negative stereotyping I saw in the Shirley Temple films, but you need to talk with children about stereotyping over and over to help them deal with people on an individual basis not as a race or ethnicity.

Doing the Architect Frank Lloyd Wright Tour

Frank Lloyd Wright is from Wisconsin, and I wanted Florence to know about him even though she was very young.  The expensive tour of Talisen would not have been appropriate for her age (6).

However, the Taliesen House has a good gift shop with a short documentary about Wright.  Florence wanted to play, but I did manage to show her some pretty houses on the documentary shown in the gift shop.

When we drove up to the house, she said, “That’s the same house that was on TV!”  I told Florence that the man who built the house had aunts who ran an art school.  (My great aunts, who had teaching degrees from UW-Whitewater, babysat those aunts and other Wright and Jones children during summer vacations at our family’s farm.)

We stopped by the Wright houses around Spring Green that are private homes and the bank and golf course (not Wright but fun) that look like a spaceship from the Jetsons cartoon series.

Kids in the Crossroads

Groups that came to perform at the Civic Center in Madison put on free shows in the lobby of the auditorium for children and their parents.  I took Florence to all of them, but had to work one weekend and dad had to do babysitting duty.

I told Laurent that the Ballet Folklorico of Mexico was coming to Madison and asked him to take Florence to the show.

When I came from work, both my husband and Florence were talking to me at once about the “Mexican Ballet.”  My husband said that they had beautiful costumes, did a war dance, and did a dance where one of the performers put her hands in a flame.

Florence said the dancers threw a streamer into the audience.  She caught one of them, which she showed me as she danced around the living room tossing it and re-rolling it. 

My husband worked long hours and on weekends.  I was glad he got to do some fun activities and outings with “kiddo,” too.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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