It is not our first time at the museum.
I float up those iron and marble stairs light as air, a drop in a cloud. I can feel myself gushing. O'Keefe is my favorite, especially her later years. "She wasn't very subtle," I tell him, "but that's why it matters."
When I was five years old, my mother and father took me to the museum for the first time. I've always been the way I am, my mouth always running, and my head always sprinting ahead even faster still. They found that somewhere between the impressionist Nihilists and the realist Evangelists I'd shut up. I was an only child who spoke enough for five. Always the brightest, but always with the least decorum. My mother kissed my hand and told me about Salvador Dali. His Persistence of Memory had hung above the mantle since my conception, adjacent to a print of Klimt's Kiss. I traced the lines on a copy of a Pollock which sat on my left wall every night as I drifted to sleep. My parents had me young. My father was an artist and my mother worked for a non-for-profit. We didn't have much, but we had our culture, and we had our wits, and that was all we needed.
I sit with him in the sculpture garden, gloved hand clutching a Starbucks hot chocolate that has long gone cold, but I stubbornly refuse to dispose of. He looks at me with a twinkle in his beryl green …show more content…
I have removed one gloved hand from my paper cup, and I interlace the fingers on it with his; they are calloused, rough. We ask each other questions about the museum; "Do you prefer Dadaism or Surrealism?" We know it's a pretentious, contrived, quite corny thing to do. But today we spent $25 we didn't have on fair trade artisan salads, and tomorrow he goes back to his premier year of medical school, memorizing formulas and muscle structures when he'd rather be in the shoddy studio we'd hastily constructed in his basement. It's a hard year. We really don't have much. But we have our wits, and it only feels right to flex
I float up those iron and marble stairs light as air, a drop in a cloud. I can feel myself gushing. O'Keefe is my favorite, especially her later years. "She wasn't very subtle," I tell him, "but that's why it matters."
When I was five years old, my mother and father took me to the museum for the first time. I've always been the way I am, my mouth always running, and my head always sprinting ahead even faster still. They found that somewhere between the impressionist Nihilists and the realist Evangelists I'd shut up. I was an only child who spoke enough for five. Always the brightest, but always with the least decorum. My mother kissed my hand and told me about Salvador Dali. His Persistence of Memory had hung above the mantle since my conception, adjacent to a print of Klimt's Kiss. I traced the lines on a copy of a Pollock which sat on my left wall every night as I drifted to sleep. My parents had me young. My father was an artist and my mother worked for a non-for-profit. We didn't have much, but we had our culture, and we had our wits, and that was all we needed.
I sit with him in the sculpture garden, gloved hand clutching a Starbucks hot chocolate that has long gone cold, but I stubbornly refuse to dispose of. He looks at me with a twinkle in his beryl green …show more content…
I have removed one gloved hand from my paper cup, and I interlace the fingers on it with his; they are calloused, rough. We ask each other questions about the museum; "Do you prefer Dadaism or Surrealism?" We know it's a pretentious, contrived, quite corny thing to do. But today we spent $25 we didn't have on fair trade artisan salads, and tomorrow he goes back to his premier year of medical school, memorizing formulas and muscle structures when he'd rather be in the shoddy studio we'd hastily constructed in his basement. It's a hard year. We really don't have much. But we have our wits, and it only feels right to flex