Brecksville, OH

Tonight, we are near Brecksville, OH, south of Cleveland, in a Super 8 motel, and very near Cuyahoga Valley National Park. The drive from Swarthmore to here today went through intermittent rain, some of it very heavy. But then it cleared off and this evening has been beautiful. We drove into Brecksville for supper at the Courtyard Cafe. We both had a "soup and spud" special - a bowl of soup and a twice-baked potato. They were ok. We got a little "Honey Bee" ice cream nearby and drive to scope out Cuyahoga Valley National Park, and ended up walking a bit on the Towpath Trail. We'll go back in the morning, but it was great to have a walk after supper. Perfect, in fact. Our walk took us under both I-271 and I-80, which are amazing examples of civil engineering from beneath:

I-80 from the Towpath Trail

I-271 from the Towpath Trail

Yesterday evening, we went to the movies at Bryn Mawr Cinema. We saw two films: (1) The Meddler, starring Susan Sarandon. It is a mother-daughter movie. After losing her husband, Marnie (the S.S. character) wants to totally control her daughter, and the daughter has to push her away. It was sort of a poignant comedy, with redemption for everyone in the end. Then we saw (2) The Man Who Knew Infinity, starring Jeremy Irons, playing the role of the Cambridge don and mathematician, G.H. Hardy, and Dev Patel, playing the genius, self-taught, Indian mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan. It was good - although it shared some of the problems of The Imitation Game which was about Alan Turing. It's hard to make a film about a figure when what makes them special cannot be communicated in a film. It is too abstract and no one would understand it. Ramanujan suffered the racist attitudes of Cambridge dons toward Indians, and also got tuberculosis and ended up dying at age 32. But he left some incredible math theory behind which we were told is still being used today, e.g., to understand black holes. He achieved his insights through intuition - from the divinity, he believed - and much of the tension of the film is around Hardy's insistence that he offer "proofs," of what he grasped intuitively.

The lobby of the Bryn Mawr Cinema

When we left Wallace's this morning, I got a picture of her garden, which is spectacular. She has really transformed her yard with plantings!

Wallace'e garden (part of it)