My Museum

    I’d been fantasizing about getting locked at the Met after closing for more than a dozen years by the time E.L. Konigsberg won the Newbery Medal in 1968 for her book From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.  Then everybody wanted to do it.  Even now, decades later, you can hardly mention a field trip to the Met without having droves of students get misty-eyed recounting tales of their spiritual kinship with the Kincaid children.  Fine and dandy, I’m always happy to hear that people are reading books, but, honestly, it was my idea.
    I grew up three blocks from the Metropolitan, and a walk across Central Park from the Museum of Natural History.  Whenever bad weather obliged, prohibiting park time after school, Micheline, my vicious French governess, took me to one museum or the other.  It was almost always the Met, not because I favored mummies over dinosaurs, which although I did, I was not permitted the agency to convert into choice, but rather due to its proximity to home.  Micheline could easily yank me to or back from the Met by the arm, or sometimes by the ear, in under five minutes.  The inclemency of New York weather assured plenty of time at the museum, which solidified my belief that the Met was my playground.  And if playground didn’t fully encompass what the Met meant to me, the use of the possessive did.  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, especially the Egyptian gallery, was mine.
    Being Egyptian by birth, and a political refugee from that country my parents never stopped considering home, made my visits to the Egyptian gallery all the more poignant.  I felt particular empathy with the multitude of grave goods that underscored the quotidian,  the very number of which -without even considering their artistry- attest to how much ancient Egyptians loved their lives and their culture.  I spent hours examining the model ships and all the dioramas of house interiors, workshops, granaries and so forth that accompanied Meketre on his journey to the afterlife, a place that these people clearly hoped would be exactly like the beloved land they’d left behind. Life in Egypt was so full and rich that their idea of heaven was a recreation of the life they’d already lived and loved; nothing could be better.
    Over time the museum has changed.  Most of exhibit space has been redesigned to the highest state of the art of curating.  The Egyptian galleries have been redone with great success, offering visitors a far better view.  The Temple of Dendur arrived and the playground I went to when it wasn’t raining was torn down to accommodate it.  A parking garage was installed at the north end on 5th, and the sledding hill lost the straightaway at the foot of the piste.  It is impossible for me to cross the 86th street transverse or travel down 5th Avenue and see the museum revealed without being accosted by memories that well from deeper than just my past .
    At night, the less than significant Temple of Dendur, graced with flawless lighting and ideal architecture, transcends to the extraordinary.  It is an apt trope for Egyptian art, whose makers were consumed with cataloguing the infinite variety and beauty that defined the gorgeous profusion everyday life offered the ruling classes in everything they made.  Egyptian art, after all this time, is suffused with extraordinary life and afterlife.  And it’s all in my museum.
   

Cryogenics

When I first learned that as a writer I would be forced like Medea to kill my children, I opened up an orphanage. OK, maybe it wasn’t that simple. At first, well, for many years actually, I was adamant about holding onto the little buggers no matter what. We all have those sentences and paragraphs we just adore, that we’ve tinkered with and fiddled on ad infinitum or nauseam, your choice, and that we know have absolutely no business showing up in our stories as they do. They are like an unexpected pregnancy you just can’t deal with right now, but perverse as are their intentions, they are still fundamentally sound and possibly usable somewhere at a later date, just not now. They are yours regardless of their poor timing, and so you love them, adverbs and all, and keep them ‘til a better time. Now that I am better at self editing, I excise them and suspend their animation in my Cryogenics file. I used to call the file Dead Babies, but renamed it after I’d had five miscarriages and terminated a second trimester Down Syndrome pregnancy, and the words became too loaded.

The sentence below is old enough to vote, fight in Afghanistan, and drink alcohol. A middle child, younger than my daughter, Julia, and older than my son, Christopher, I’ve just taken it out to examine as a curiosity, like a wedding dress bought for a marriage that never took place. I once was very proud of it, bordering on hubris, spent endless hours crafting it, but now it makes me wince. After having relocated it to other pieces several times, I amputated, and it has inhabited Dead Babies and now Cryogenics for years. Jejune and overwrought, I saved it knowing it would come in handy one day, and now it has. It is posted here as an example of maybe not quite purple, but certainly lavender, prose.

I've been working on a sentence all day, and now I nearly have it. Oh, just a few more minutes alone! This morning when I woke, the little fragment was quickening in my brain, the crumb of a dream. I massaged it while I shampooed my hair, energized it in the hot rush of shower, untangled it with conditioner as I tamed my wild curls. For hours I turned it around, tweaking and prodding it, feeling it change, irresistible as a loose tooth to the tongue of a child. Oysters must feel like this, rolling that grain of sand around, coating it, smoothing it once and again with nacreous goo until, at long last, it emerges: a fully-formed pearl. Not that my words are pearls: the analogy is in the process, not the product.

The intention is good, the overall metaphor not bad, and some phrases “crumb of a dream,” “irresistible as a loose tooth,” and “nacreous goo” still have a certain appeal. It’s so difficult to disengage yourself, to push yourself away from your creation and evaluate with a disinterested eye. Both of my children are smart and physically attractive, about which I am not even slightly embarrassed about being glad, but I have friends who are not as fortunate. They have children who are neither as smart, nor as good looking, nor as charming as mine. Some kids are just stinkers, and others cannot be called cute by any standards, and yet, against all odds, their parents love them. But they often try to make us like them, too, and there I draw the line. I am not fond of other people’s children, sometimes don’t even like my own, and suspect the sentiment is far more widespread than admitted to. So it is with writing.

Bibendum & Me

We were the American cousins, so every summer when I was a child we migrated back to Europe. Aunt Vicky’s house in Geneva served as the base from which we would travel to wherever the adults had decided to rent a house by the beach, invariably Mediterranean and usually in Italy. The best times of my childhood were the week or two each year, when, free of Micheline, my vicious French governess, my mother, father and I, accompanied by our Guide Michelin, would drive from Geneva to Capri or Mallorca or wherever the rented house was. We’d swerve off on whatever worthwhile detours Bibendum, the tire man, suggested, whether for a must see, must eat or you’ll regret it forever if you don’t sleep at this hotel. In those days, Michelin, despite its red ubiquity, served as a guide to tempt the average tourist off the beaten path in search of various pleasures, to point him to the authentic travel experience. Mum, Dad and Bibendum took me to amazing places, whether to savor an elemental risotto with truffles, sleep in a converted 14th century abbey, or be given the gift of a visit to the mind-blowing Lascaux caves, which now are closed, very likely forever. These watershed moments have remained as vivid in memory as when first experienced.

I was eight when we visited the Sistine Chapel. Back then, you had to dress to visit a church, and females not wearing long sleeves, skirts and head coverings were denied entry. My mother always carried the lace mantillas we’d previously acquired in Spain for the purpose, and I know that wearing them and dressing for the experience only heightened it. The Chapel was closed when we arrived, but Dad’s fluent Italian and a few thousand lire, opened the doors. As you know, the place is vast, and back then, in ‘59, the ceiling had not yet been cleaned or restored.

We lay down on the marble benches displayed about the room, moving from one to another, at one with the cool marble, at one with the astonishing and teeming ceiling, alone with the beauty –transported by it—seeing it each for the first time but simultaneously aware that we weren’t the first and that anybody who was anybody had been there before. Earlier that day we’d seen Keats’s and Shelley’s graves at the Protestant cemetery. They had been there. Napoleon, my mother’s favorite historical figure, stopped by whenever he visited his sister Pauline Borghese, whose palazzo we also visited. Somehow these added to the experience. It was my virgin viewing, but it was augmented by the fact that it had been viewed before by other people who, dwarfed by Michelangelo’s achingly gorgeous art had shared the same feelings of awe, humility and capillary twitching excitement. It was my first time, and it was heightened by the impasto of all those others’ first times, one on top of the other.

In 2004, I took my children to Italy for their first time. Our strategically chosen hotel was steps from the Vatican, and there we hastened after a very early breakfast, intending to pop into the Sistine Chapel, and avoid the crowds. There was already a line, however, and extremely long, to get in. It would take a good two hours just to snake to the doors of the Sistine Chapel, and then we would enter the sanctum sanctorum accompanied by hordes, and be whisked out again in no time. No lying on cool marble benches. There was a heat wave that summer, the Yen was strong, and the queue was made up of hundreds of Japanese tourists, trimmed like Christmas trees with digital equipment for every need. They all wore hi-tech fly-fishing vests with hooks and carabiners attached to hold water bottles, maps, fans, cell phones –whatever the up-to-the-minute traveler might require—and were crowned in air conditioned pith helmets with battery-operated fans. I had viewed these items in a catalogue of high-end useless and costly devices and wondered who the hell would ever in a million years buy these things. Well, here was who. Every single one of them.

Still smarting from the indignity and disappointment of introducing the kids to the Mona Lisa at the Louvre the previous year, I made a command decision not to inflict the Sistine Chapel on them. The vision of standing packed side by side like anchovies, or koi, looking up at the brilliantly polychromed ceiling with hordes of tourists of any nationality in fly fishing vests and pith helmets was too painful to contemplate. I felt hideously guilty at the time for depriving my children, when in Rome, of an indisputable must-see, the Real Thing in anyone’s book. But I wanted them to savor the Sistine Chapel in a similarly private and real way as I had on my first visit. This was now clearly an impossibility, and I wasn’t going to make them stand in the blazing sun for hours only to be tourist sheep quickly herded through the Chapel and then disgorged into a street filled with stands selling Sistine Chapel shot glasses, umbrella, tea towels.

We never liked Disney World.