A Day at the Museum

You know how they say you never know what you have till it's gone? I'd like to add that you don't know what you have until it's almost gone. In a few days, I have to leave the tri-state area and head South. I'm looking forward to some Southern hospitality, events in NOLA, and the return of the What-a-Burger, but overall, I'm not ready to leave. That's why I decided I'd give Connecticut and New York another lap around the track. I'd go back to favorite spots and seek out the new. Yesterday, that mindset led me back to the Met. The exhibit "Manus x Machina" did not disappoint. I'm not going to explain the exhibit here, except anecdotally, sharing that the 3d printer-tie-in to modern-day designs was nothing short of extraordinary, even for a 10-year-old boy who happened to be with me. I was touring the museum with him, a former tutee, and his big sisters, who joined me from Brooklyn. He particularly seemed to love an image of 3D printed bones, in the guise of a so-called dress that to me, looked more like something a dinosaur would have spat out. Perhaps it was a reaction to his overindulgence of chicken fingers a bit early, where we had partaken of pricey salads and fries-fare. "Don't take that out here!" snapped a Met guard. Startled, I wondered if I'd stumbled across the Gestapo. 'Relax,' I thought to myself, 'I wasn't thinking, and besides, it's w-a-t-e-r!" Similar barks came whenever museumgoers wanted to get too close to artwork or, horrors, turn the flash on their iPhones. Admittedly, the jostling for space and wall-to-wall phones was annoying, but no more so than a full bladder if there was a line for the commode. However, let me praise the sweet male attendants who treated me and my crowd like royalty. When I asked where the mummies were, an older suited Met guard said, "Follow me." Were we walking into a hidden crypt? - what was going on? We walked a few paces, turned, walked, turned, then ended up in a narrow glass-partitioned expanse lined with 4,000-year-old mummies on either side. The boy stooped, and was looking beneath the raised cophin-y-Egyptian-thingy. His sister laughed, "He thinks he an see something under there." Guard interjected, "Oh, he can. Come here." And pulled out his wee flashlight. "Look down there." We all crouched. I gasped. "Right - that's the outline of her hand, see it?" Yikes. A 4,000-year-old female body wrapped in gauze bandages was visible beneath the crypt, which our tour guide coined a "double cophin." He turned and explained, "Over there is a triple". So the body went in a box, and all of that went in an even bigger box. "Jose, do you understand how old all of this is?" He looked confused. We were standing in front of the heiroglyphs at this point. I then explained what BC versus AD was, explaining twice until he got it. At first he, rightly, couldn't understand why something that said, say, 2435 BC was over 4,000 years ago. ... Other highlights of the Met tour: seeing the Turner whaling paintings, and musing about how Melville very likely was inspired by them, and wondering why I was looking at bloody images with wonder. I was repulsed by such activities in modernday life. Reni paintings, elaborate statues, the milling around of tourists who require guidebooks in over a dozen languages, the kind Met attendant who told me, "Pay what you can" and meant it, the fleeting feeling that I was a celebrity attending the Met gala when I looked at Chanel and Dior gowns...It was quite a day. That's why I decided to walk the thirty-something blocks back to Grand Central, taking Madison so I could muse at shops I'd either only heard about or hadn't seen in a while. A French perfumery, a humble narrow coffee shop, the way-cool ground plaques regaling Madison as the Advertising mecca for slogans like "Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don't" (thank you, Almond Joy and Dancer Fitzgerald), the slightly bulbous faux blonde with the tiny white dog on a leash around 83rd who, my mind imagined, was probably the wife or girlfriend of a rich Saudi, the cute red polka dot sneakers worn by a pretty young Asian, and the Starbucks, where a young tourist asked if she could cut in the bathroom line: "It's an emergency!" ... Passion for a city is not like passion for a man: it's better. It will always be there, and every time you return, it only gets better. "Don't ever apologize for what you love," a boss once said to me after I'd lost my cat. New York, no apologies.

CAPTION: Issey Miyake (Japanese, born 1938) for Miyake Design Studio (Japanese, founded 1970) "Flying Saucer" dress, spring/summer 1994 Courtesy of The Miyake Issey Foundation