My wife and I made a brief weekend visit to Atlanta and Macon, a couple of weekends ago.

It was a two-part trip.

She wanted to take in an interactive exhibit on the famed Post-Impressionist painter, Vincent Van Gogh, with her sister, in Doraville, on Atlanta’s north side.

She also wanted to attend a student production at her alma mater in Macon, Wesleyan College, which we have been to many times before, and always enjoyed. So we took the weekend off to do both.

She found a newly-restored historic old hotel in Griffin, GA, just north of Macon, and booked us a reservation for that Friday night. We left that morning, and as luck would have it, happened to pull up into the hotel parking lot behind the building, in the middle of downtown Griffin, right behind her sister, who had driven down from the Newnan area. Talk about great timing!

The sister being far more familiar with Atlanta, we were happy to have her drive us to the exhibition hall in Doraville. It was an interesting exhibit, and I learned a lot about Van Gogh that I had not known before – which was very little, to begin with.

He was apparently afflicted with bipolar disorder, which is caused by chemical imbalances in the brain, but nobody knew that, back then (late 1800’s). He may also have been color-blind, which would explain why he used such vivid, bright colors in his paintings: he needed the bright contrasts to distinguish what he was trying to paint.

Perhaps his most famous painting, “Starry Night,” which features large colorful swirls of blue and white above the small and dark town below, was actually the view out of the tiny window he had in his small room in a sanatorium in Arles, in southern France, where he had gone for treatment for his bipolar condition.

I had never heard that before!

We also learned that, although he painted some 2,000 paintings in his ten-year artistic period, he only sold one of them! That must have been terribly depressing.

Others he gave as presents to family members, or in payment for bills, when he had little cash.

Ironically, it was a sister- in-law who recognized his talent, at the time, and managed to save a large number of his canvases.

Sone of them have sold for tens of millions of dollars, in recent years, and are among some of the most famous and most recognizable works of art in our modern times.

(What’s that old saying?

“A prophet is never appreciated in his own time.”) So that, in brief, was our visit to that exhibition. Her sister drove us back to Griffin, stopping off long enough to pick her husband up on the way, and we went to dinner a block away from the hotel, once we got back to Griffin.

Another irony: Anne’s sister had wanted to go to a place called “The Corner Café,” at the other end of the block our hotel was on, because she had heard it was a good place to go.

So we went there – only to find the place was packed, a dozen folks were in line ahead of us, and it was an hour wait (at least) to get seated! (We decided not to wait.)

So we walked across the street to Angelo’s Mediterranean (Greek-Italian) restaurant instead, which had been my original recommendation. It too was full, but we only had two couples ahead of us, and it did not take long to get seated.

The food was good, the service attentive (though they were very busy that night), and I was glad we had the opportunity to experience that place. (Anne and I did go to the Corner Café the next morning for breakfast, before heading back to Macon, and were glad we did. The food was good, and reasonably priced; and they were not as busy that day as they were the night before. So we did get to experience both places, after all.)

Saturday morning we walked around the old downtown section for a bit, and got to take in the historic architecture. The hotel we stayed in was built in 1910, and was apparently quite plush for its time. It closed many years later, and was vacant for a long time, as that downtown experienced the same decline many small towns did. But it was bought by local investors a couple of years ago, restored to its former glory, and now enjoys a booming business.

We would definitely go back! Small towns are the backbone of this country. We had never been “to” Griffin before, just passed by it” or “through it on the way to somewhere else”; so were glad we had the chance to actually “see it” on this trip.

More in the next installment. 

Rafe Semmes is a proud graduate of (“the original”) Savannah High School and the University of Georgia. He and his wife live in eastern Liberty County with their passel of orphan rescue cats, and are long-time Rotarians. He writes on a variety of topics, and may be reached at rafe_semmes@yahoo.com.