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.