One of the things I like about art fairs is being able to see such a wide variety of artists in one place.

I’ve had a little stack of cards on my desk since the Brookside Art Fair, including Jody Depew McLeane’s pastels, top.

Signe & Genna Grushovenko collaborate on oil paintings based on vintage photographs.

And Dick Daniels’s cartoonish commentary.

All images via the artists’ sites which you can find through the highlighted links above.

I ate and drank everything without a care and gained nary an ounce, hereby confirming that the fried potato is the enemy.  (It must be a embedded in my Irish peasant genes; I can never resist.)  Certainly a country filled with bread and pastry and wine is going to be high on my list.

Will I remember, I wonder, the smell of the lillies in the Rodin Museum?  Or the sound of the rain on the gravel path?

Or the feeling of getting on a bicycle for the first time in thirty years as the young woman gave the seat a shove and said, “Don’t worry!  Momentum is your friend!”?

I hope that I do.  I will certainly remember our last lunch, our best meal.  He had his tenth piece of beef, so rare he could barely cut it, so delicious he could barely pause to speak.  Though he’d tried a variety of things, escargot being the most memorable, he refused a bite of my pate.  A foolish move.

“If we didn’t have to leave tomorrow, if we could stay as long as you wanted, how long would you stay?”

“I would stay for years.”

That meal was unforgettable.

We received so many wonderful recommendations for food that it would have taken years, indeed, to try them all.  These are a few favorites.  Brasserie Fernand, Polidor, Le Bouldogue – where we actually ate twice we were so charmed (and not just by the three French Bulldogs in attendance), and Le Comptoir de le Relais.  The last was our best meal, as it had been promised to be.  We’d been instructed to wait if there were a line.  There was.  We did.  We were glad.