I took a little vacation yesterday. I needed it after these past couple of weeks. I was on my way to a meeting in Connecticut this morning, after which I was planning to stop by my daughter's school in New York and drop off her winter coat and bring home some summer clothes. I was halfway up the Jersey Turnpike when my sister called and told me that the meeting was cancelled. I was already pretty far from home and my daughter needed the coat and I wasn't going to just turn around so I continued on into New York.

Once I got up there I did a couple of shopping errands I'd originally planned to do in Connecticut and then it was still a couple of hours before I was supposed to meet my daughter, so what was I going to do? My first thought was to go down to midtown and watch people scurry. This is usually pretty entertaining, especially during the christmas shopping season. But I just wasn't in the mood.

For some reason, it popped into my mind that I wanted to go to the Frick. The Frick, for those not familiar, is a small museum a few blocks south of the so-called Museum Mile, where the Met and Guggenheim reign. It has a small but by all accounts spectacular collection of paintings, including several by that most elusive of artists, Jan Vermeer. There are only around 35 Vermeer paintings in existence, and they are all exquisite. Three of these are at the Frick, along with some other Dutch painters like Rembrandt, Hals, Van Dyck and Holbein, along with a nice collection of Turner paintings. I had never been there, even having lived in New York for close to 30 years. I'm not really what you'd call an "art lover," and I have no education in art or art history. But I've learned over the years that anything truly great is worth taking time to appreciate, even if it isn't really your thing, because it enriches you in ways that you can't anticipate.

The museum is very small, and seems to be in the rooms of what had been a mansion (I'm too lazy to do the research to find out of that's actually what it was) and there are masterpieces in every room and two of the Vermeers are in the hallway. Even there, Vermeer's unparalleled use of light to reproduce depth and texture comes flying off the canvas. There isn't even a mediocre piece in the entire collection and most of the paintings are knock-your-socks-off great. I spent an hour or so in there, with a few dozen other people, and was totally transported. I left with a huge smile on my face. I had been in a totally different universe during that time.

Then I stepped out on the street and realized I was hungry, so I used Yelp to find me a nondescript little pizza place a block away that had terrific pizza. It was time to get over to meet my daughter, so I attempted to walk across Central Park, but was so enchanted by the Rambles that I forgot to keep track of my direction and ended up going in a big circle. So I ended up taking the bus over instead of walking, but it was a marvelous couple of hours.