A Lovely Prospect

Some of the coolest kid lit is by Ruth Chew. I love, love, loved her elegant books when I was little. They are fun, and sweet, and simple and usually about a brother and sister who live in Brooklyn, walk to and from Prospect Park on their own, have sandwiches packaged in paper by their mom, and encounter magic. Things that we experience as kids leave deep impressions; whenever I think of Prospect Park there is -- even if it's fleeting -- a thought about those books... and me as an elementary school child thinking about Brooklyn, and very simple magic, like a measuring tape that can make things bigger, or scissors that can snip things smaller.

Today's field trip was to Prospect Park. When we first came up from the subway The Boy kept saying something that we all thought was, "The guy is scaring me." I looked for a pedophile or ranter or ranting pedophile that he might have spotted. The Girl looked at the statue we were coming up on and said, "Well, at least a fig leaf is covering it..." After a bit of similarly ridiculous commentary we finally all got on the same page: it was the SKY that was scaring him. There were no buildings to keep it in check. Obviously, we leave the city often, but perhaps there's usually a more gradual fading away... or perhaps the sky today just seemed particularly expansive.  

Another my-kids-are-growing-up-in-an-urban-environment moment was when The Girl gasped and said, "What is that smell?  I love it!" A lawn mower had just passed. It was the sharp and distinct smell of just-cut grass. 

We stumbled upon the Camperdown Elm, and we are so glad that we did (read cool article here). 

And visited the outside of the Lefferts House. ("Lefferts house has been a witness to a landscape constantly changed by people. The Lefferts family house was built using trees that grew in the area. Then the house became the anchor for a farming and grazing business that transformed the land. Finally, the house itself had to make way, the landcape was changing once again, into a modern city.")

We also went to the zoo. Personally, I didn't care for it as much as the Central Park zoo, even though the two are very similar. The kids liked it -- The Girl will never hear an even slightly critical remark regarding anything with animals, and The Boy loved a turkey (he named Rockyroad) and an emu -- that he said he would really like for a pet, but he would use some Alberto V05 hair styling gel and a comb to fix the weird hair. The Sister and I thought this was hilarious: Judd the Red Chicken -- Stylist to the Emus.

The carousel was great; we all rode it. 

And then we headed over to the Brooklyn Museum. 

We particularly liked roaming about the visible storage.

We came home tired, but I hope that something lovely, if not magical, will stick in the beings of the brother and sister team that headed to Prospect Park today. 

Good People Live in the Buildings Around Here

Our family friend found out about a neat book that was coming out, pre-ordered a copy for us, and dropped it by our apartment the very day it came. All just because she's awesome. To come home and have the doorman hand you an unexpected present is a lovely thing. To have friends that know your interests and do thoughtful things to support them is truly sublime (rabbit hole alert! I just thought, Hey Sublime! I haven't thought about that band for a while!...The Boy might like that band...  a lot of his little ditties around here have a ska-like cadence... so I youtubed... and it brought back a lot of memories... aaaaand considering the trajectories of most music-makers I became even more convinced that we must develop more of The Boy's talents other than garage-band-like singing/dancing (...and Ukrainian egg decorating...)). The book:

The note: "Dear -- When I saw this book, it made me think of you. I hope you will go on another adventure with me to see some of these buildings and we'll see if Mr. James Gulliver Hancock drew them correctly. Love, --"

As an art activity we created our "thank you's" -- using Hancock's style we went across the street from our friend's building and sketched with pen, and then went home and added watercolor.

Friends... Flowers... Skills

Today I went with a very good friend, who is turning 77 this year, to the Morgan Library. I've been feeling like I haven't really had any quality time with her for a while, and I needed to be with her long enough to collect my thoughts, rather than just exchange surface comments. I had a nice time hearing tidbits of her sojourn here in the city (around fifty years?) -- funny memories of odd jobs and odd people. She reads everything and knows every BBC/PBS actor. She has the entire Manhattan bus system memorized. She has skills; she's an enjoyable companion. 

At the Morgan, aside from the regular collection (How I want all those beautiful old books! How I love reading the letters, like the one where John Steinbeck doubts the quality of the "g-d- book" that wasn't coming together -- The Grapes of Wrath!), right now there is an exhibit on Degas. Which was, of course, of interest to me because of our recent visits to the Met... Apparently Degas became interested in the "artificial" aspects of life that came with modernity -- or "unnatural realism." A social form of entertainment that was crazy popular in France at the time, and that reflected such artifice, was the circus. Degas attended and became quite intrigued with a trapeze performer -- Miss La La -- a woman who had the ability to not just hang 70 feet in the air by her teeth, but also to hold a 150-pound canon with her teeth (suspended by a chain) when it blew... Skills. Many of the sketches and preliminary paintings for Degas's painting Miss La La, and the Cirque Fernando are on display, and it sparked my curiosity to walk through and wonder why he made the revisions that he did. What it was that he learned from each practice; how each shrewd calculation, or inspired experiment got him closer to capturing what he felt and saw and understood. Skills. 

This evening The Dad tried to get home early so we could go to a public garden and have a bit of a picnic (he jogged past it this morning and came home excited to share his dinner plan). Unfortunately, just as we were unswaddling our sandwiches that we bought at Milano Market we were told that the garden was being closed for the night. It was disappointing, for the lights just coming on as the gloaming waned were creating the perfect atmosphere for the tulips and other blossoms. 

Happy May Day. As kids, Big Sister and I used to decorate those green plastic strawberry containers and then leave the basket of flowers on our neighbor's doorstep (the dear lady was very gracious about the fact that we picked from her yard in order to properly fill out the arrangement). The delivery was always quite mysterious -- we would knock on the door and then tuck along the side of the house, not daring to breathe until the basket was brought in with an audible: "How nice! Who could these be from?" and the door was snugly shut. 

As it turns out, The Boy and The Girl aren't the most savvy doorbell ditchers in the history of doorbell ditching. It makes me worried: by not being raised in suburbia are they not learning vital life skills? Have I been naive in assuming that if there was ever a need, they would be able to hold their own toilet-papering a house...? 

For art today we put together the May Day "baskets" for our two favorite neighbors. For Physical Education The Boy and The Girl sprinted past one neighbor's door just as she unexpectedly opened it for the second time -- The Boy tried to look casual (like he had in fact NOT been the one to just ring the doorbell, and just HAPPENED to be passing by at a sprint) and said, "Oh. Hey." Somehow, for all their stealth, the kids became key suspects, and this evening I received one really sweet text, and one fun email:

Dear --:

I just found a beautiful present on my door. Such lovely flowers, wrapped so creatively and imaginatively. I wonder where it could have come from.  Any ideas?  I want to thank the thoughtful people who left me such a special gift.

A picture is below, in case you think of a way to identify the suspects.

From the Notebook

Last weekend the teenage girls that attend my church had a full agenda from Friday after school to a sunrise(ish) service on Sunday. My current calling, or job at church, is to work with these girlies, so I helped coordinate, and then attended all the activities. It was an opportunity to bond as a group (sometimes, time's benefits come as much from quantity as quality) while looking at things in the city a bit differently. They had a presentation from a fashion expert, watched An Affair to Remember, participated in a service project, ate breakfast at Norma's, had a private tour from a brilliant docent at the Met, attended a concert at Juilliard, learned about travel photography, consumed crepes, walked part of the Brooklyn Bridge and got to have dinner in a design studio in SoHo while learning about the nuances of design. Whew. My kids were well taken care of while I was out and about taking care of others' kids, but they felt that by attending the Met without them I had committed parentery (I just made that up -- instead of adultery... instead of an adult being unfaithful... a parent being unfaithful... oh, just bag it...). So with brand-spankin' new sketchbooks we headed over to the Met today so I could tell them "exactly" what the docent told me... 

Our theme of the weekend was: "What is Beauty" (Beauty is Service, Beauty is Art, etc...), so the docent very obligingly used our theme as the structure of her presentation. 

On our way to the elevators we stopped by a Kongo Power figure (I forgot to take a picture, but here's the link) -- a squat wooden fellow with pieces of metal sticking out of him. Our docent asked if he was a good representation of "beauty." Of course it was a trick question. She explained his purpose in a society: he was revered because of his ability to keep order. When somebody had done something wrong, he/she would go before this figure and make a pledge, or a promise, to not do that action again and then seal the pledge by driving in a piece of metal. This figure's job was to stand as a reminder for people to keep the peace -- he improved people's lives. The docent posited that because the figure was so admired he could be defined as beautiful.

Upstairs we started with Bougureau's work completed in 1873 -- the perfect example of academic art. Flawless and created with invisible brushstrokes, the academic artists used light and color to direct the eye of the viewer. With academic art there was usually a character-driven moral (in this case: don't spy on wood nymphs bathing, or they might find you out -- you filthy satyr -- and try to drag you into the water where you will drown because of your goat legs).  

And then came the Impressionists. She took us to what she said was one of the Met's treasures: Monet's La Guenouillere. The Impressionists sought to capture, and in so doing ennoble, real life. Here was a scene like one we have all seen, with no one character standing out, but yet all characters being important in that strangers/those we share space with, are a part of our reality. Further: nature. Nature played a large role in the Impressionist movement. Huge, deep brushstrokes to capture the refraction and reflection of light and movement; not an idealization of water, but the actual feeling of water.  This brought on a movement, and changed the way people thought about not only art, but beauty.

Degas. Beyond the sculpture are the paintings of ballerinas that Degas is so well known for. His ballerinas were not porcelain-perfect, but rather real gals hitching up their wrinkly tights. He captured them, not as ideals, but as real working people who were often damaged, or tired (and according to a movie I saw about Degas, he contributed to the working gals being damaged and tired). Cad or not, he was an artist that championed the beauty to be seen in the real details (said a different way: the turning away from the thought that beauty was something created, rather than captured). Like Uncle Walt (Whitman), he found sweat and the modern world art-worthy. (Note: his ability to carry the theme of humanity being reflected in details, and vise-versa, was brilliant -- In Dancers Practicing at the Barre you can see how the dancer on the right has the same lines as the watering can (which would have been there to keep down the dirt and dust).)

We stopped by to look at Van Gogh's Wheat Field With Cypresses and learned that cypresses represented eternal life and were often planted around cemeteries. A detail that Van Gogh would obviously have known, as he was obsessed with cypresses. In this picture he also painted wheat fields, which was symbolic of life with its many cycles/seasons, and poppies -- symbolic of the resurrection. Our docent pointed out the wheat being pushed by the wind to the right, and the olive trees being pushed to the left... and the cypresses standing tall and straight. The brush strokes, true to Van Gogh's style, are thick and deep. She said that the painting had a sculptural quality -- something that cannot be reproduced -- thus requiring trips to the museum to see the actual work in order to get a true sense of the movement and energy. Capturing life and vitality. And beauty. 

By way of conclusion, our docent stopped us by a movie playing on a large screen. James Nares took thousands of photos of the streets of NYC and created an hour long movie of kids running, and people looking grumpy (or thuggish, or vacant, or amused, or ethereal), and signs, and piles, and garbage cans. The music, as well as the soothing rhythm of the stills sliding along as a video are mesmerizing. Our guide said that she was ending the tour with this exhibit because it was a contemporary take on the Impressionist ideal: art is about capturing and celebrating the small details of real life, as well as the eternal qualities of the natural world. 

Thanks to my notes, I was able to give my kids a fairly comparable tour. They were satisfied, we got some soup and rolls at the cafeteria in the American Wing, did a couple of sketches, and then had to leave in order to make it to their last science class. 

While the kids liked the science class, we will not miss the forever-long weekly schlep to the location. As if the subway trip wasn't long enough, in order to gain sunlight again we had to go up what we called "the escalator of despair." While I know that London's tube has some crazy long/steep escalators, for NYC this one was pretty despairing. 

We became acquainted with Washington Heights, an opportunity that we probably would not have had otherwise. And the kids really liked the final activity of the class today -- dissecting owl pellets. We now how two random baggies of rodent bones hanging around the apartment. The small details of life.

Balzac asked: "What is art?" He answered: "Nature concentrated." 

Finally. There Is a Post With Good Writing.

We were standing in that Swedish farmstead yard when the thought came to me that we needed to read My Antonia this April. I recorded it here, and having just searched for it, so as to link it, I sit here stunned. Six months ago. April was on the other side of the world then, and now there's just one day left of it. 

I tried to get the kids excited about it, I really did. The problem was the competition. I was trying to read it simultaneously with The Dad's reading of Swallows and Amazons (in anticipation of our upcoming trip to the Lake District). They were smitten by The Dad's choice (understandably -- Ransome could not have written a more charming book), and so became increasingly icy with me every time I suggested a break in order to read some of Cather's novel. Finally, we hit on a compromise -- I would silently read of Jim Burden's consuming of, and longing for, his Bohemian girl (and Cather's similar intimacy with Nebraska), and when I came to a passage that they might like, they would graciously allow me to read out loud.  

It only kind of worked. Once I became submerged into the world of grass the color of wine, and an independent girl tripping along in striped tights, and the intoxication of living ... well, I kind of forgot to think about what smaller parts could exist and mean something away from the whole. 

What I did read to them:

"All the years that have passed have not dimmed my memory of that first glorious autumn. The new country lay open before me: there were no fences in those days, and I could choose my own way over the grass uplands, trusting the pony to get me home again. Sometimes I followed the sunflower-bordered roads. Fuchs told me that the sunflowers were introduced into that country by the Mormons; that at the time of the persecution, when they left Missouri and struck out into the wilderness to find a place where they could worship God in their own way, the members of the first exploring party, crossing the plains to Utah, scattered sunflower seed as they went. The next summer, when the long trains of wagons came through with all the women and children they had the sunflower trail to follow. I believe that botanists do not confirm Fuchs's story, but insist that the sunflower was native to those plains. Nevertheless, that legend has stuck in my mind, and sunflower-bordered roads always seem to me the roads to freedom."

"The rabbits were unusually spry that afternoon. They kept starting up all about us, and dashing off down the draw as if they were playing a game of some kind. But the little buzzing things that lived in the grass were all dead -- all but one. While we were lying there against the warm bank, a little insect of the palest, frailest green hopped painfully out of the buffalo grass and tried to leap into a bunch of bluestem. He missed it, fell back, and sat with his head sunk between his long legs, his antennae quivering, as if he were waiting for something to come and finish him. Tony  made a warm nest for him in her hands; talked to him gaily and indulgently in Bohemian. Presently he began to sing for us -- a thin, rusty little chirp... When the bank on the other side of the draw began to throw a narrow shelf of shadow, we knew we ought to be starting homeward; the chill came on quickly when the sun got low, and Antonia's dress was thin. What were we to do with the frail little creature we had lured back to life by false pretenses? I offered my pockets, but Tony shook her head and carefully put the green insect in her hair, tying her big handkerchief down loosely over her curls."

"When spring came, after a hard winter, one could not get enough of the nimble air. Every morning I wakened with a fresh consciousness that winter was over. There were none of the signs of spring for which I used to watch in Virginia, no budding woods or blooming gardens. There was only -- spring itself; the throb of it, the light restlessness, the vital essence of it everywhere: in the sky, in the swift clouds, in the pale sunshine, and in the warm, high wind -- rising suddenly, sinking suddenly, impulsive and playful like a big puppy that pawed you and then lay down to be petted." [OH! The English teacher in me thrills at that sentence -- the craft mirrors the content!  A sentence that uses punctuation to sustain itself, so it can continue to rush forward, and ebb and flow without being stymied... I am clasping my hands to my heart.]

"There was a basic harmony between Antonia and her mistress. They had strong, independent natures, both of them. They knew what they liked, and were not always trying to imitate other people. They loved children and animals and music, and rough play and digging in the earth. They liked to prepare rich, hearty food and to see people eat it; to make up soft white beds and to see youngsters asleep in them. They ridiculed conceited people and were quick to help unfortunate ones. Deep down in each of them there was a kind of hearty joviality, a relish of life, not over-delicate, but very invigorating."

The funny thing is that I didn't even share with them THE part of the book that makes it a necessity to read in April (book three, section three -- for those of you wondering).  And I've decided to be okay with that. The scheme has been about compromise and gaining wisdom -- realizing that very few things happen, or are learned, all at once and for keeps. Rather, it is about layering. A layer has been established. Someday they will read the book in its entirety and another layer will be added. Then someday he/she will go to a play with the right person and walk out in the rain on an April night and there will be lilacs -- another layer. 

For now I will content myself with a memory I have of one of my favorite literature professors. She brought up a book and with snapping eyes said: I am jealous of those of you who get to read it for the first time. 

We didn't read My Antonia as a family, but I get to be jealous of my kids, for there's still that first time for them... for the book, for other books, for lilacs in the rain in April...