Yesterday, we officially began our attempt to oversee and evaluate every major and significant college and university in the United States and England. By the time we are through, Fodors will have nothing on us and our ability to evaluate, to find and recount schools from Chicago to the East Coast and the United Kingdom. If you want to know any significant fact, like how many cafeterias there are, how late the library is open, book and shelf counts, etc., we are the ones to ask. The students at the first school we visited, all seemed exceptionally bright (young Mark Zuckerberg's) full of ideas and thoughts to change the world. They are participants in this new, high tech world. As they were bouncing around the campus, leaping from steps, exposing great ideas in mid air, I was exhausted from just having walked from the lower campus to the upper campus. It's time to move aside and relinquish this brave new world to them. Thank God someone still has enormous enthusiasm and optimism for the future. I on the other hand am looking longingly over my shoulder to the Edwardian England of Downtown Abbey. I must admit I consider myself a man ideas and letters, and education is very important to me. I do not care about the basketball or football teams. I don't care how well the lacrosse team is fairing. I do care about learning, teaching ideas, and knowledge. College, the greatest four years of your life, is about emotional and intellectual growth, and although I joke endlessly with my daughter, I am a very proud father. So while traveling to Boston yesterday I was reminded of my total humiliation with my second and last college trip with my father some 47 years ago. In the early spring of 1965 my father decided that I should go to Harvard. Never-mind that no one in our family had ever attended there, and it was extremely questionable whether I had the grades or the ability to attend. He was very determined that it most probably was the right school for me. To this day, I never knew where he got this notion, definitely not from me. He made an appointment for an interview, and I was informed that he and I would drive up to Boston together in his Rolls Royce. Maybe he knew something that I didn't. I knew he wasn't rich enough to give a building, or endow a chair, or outfit the whole school in uniforms, but without any delay or equivocation, off we went that fine spring day to Cambridge. All went well until we were just outside of Cambridge on the Massachusetts turnpike, when I heard a large noise followed by a large thud. We had a flat tire. Of course, I proposed calling AAA to come and change the tire, but that would have made us considerably late for our meeting and my father would have none of it. He had purchased some months prior,…

As many of you might be aware, I pride myself on being an original, some would call it an eccentric. To me it all feels perfectly natural, and if you were to gaze at me superficially, I most probably on the outside appear to be quite normal, successful, and happy. It would appear that I have it all. On a later date I can explain why appearance can be deceptive, and why I appear as I do, but this is not even the first sentence to the prologue of this story, so I better get on with it. You see I have always loved houses. I easily could have been an architect, a furniture designer, or a woodworker. I love jointery and how things fit together perfectly and permanently. So, in the early seventies, with a small inheritance from my grandmother, I started to restore an 18th Century sea captains house on the Connecticut coast. It was a very modest house with an old boathouse attached to the back which we made into a kitchen. There was also a small cow barn which a few years later I made into my studio and darkroom. Now here comes the kicker that I expect very few Americans to understand. We live in a land where everything is speculation, ease of mobility, transition, status and a means to a larger end. As I see it, very few Americans invest their soul in their houses, keeping them simply houses rather than a home. To be perfectly clear, I am not talking about raising children in a house, living in one place for a number of years, feeling security and comfort that a roof provides, or enjoying the neighborhood and friends. I am talking about something that is completely different. You might think that the qualities described above distinguish a home from a house, but for me they do not. What I am talking about is analogous to a mother's eternal and uninhibited love for her child. If there is one place that remains in this culture where emotion, passion and feeling are still expressed openly, it is in a mother's love for her child. Now my home (for better or probably for worse) is my life. If I open my front door to you (which today is a totally different house and place, which I will talk about more at a later date) I am opening my soul to you for scrutiny. I have invested the very fiber of my being in the details before you. I have allowed you to enter a very private domain, the hidden recesses of my emotional life. Now here lies the problem, most Americans do not have a clue what I am talking about. My house today is a far grander and perhaps a more beautiful home than my earlier house, but the same held true then as it does today. It is my belief that as most people walk through this beautiful house, they are probably figuring…

Like the culture, I am running on empty this week. I need a week to fill up. Stay tuned and see you next week.