Four favorite museum memories

For a year or two my mom brought me to the Metropolitan Museum of Art most Saturdays. Considering we spent a few dozen hours in the museum I came back to it as a teenager then an adult surprised at how much of the museum was new, never before seen. Those Saturday morning visits had a particular route: as fast as possible through Egypt to the Temple of Dendur, then upstairs and off to European Painting and Sculpture. I would always stand in front of the two Cot paintings, of the child couple on the swing and of them as teenagers running from a storm. I remember realizing at some point that their feet were in the wrong place, too close, and they were going to bump into each other on their next step.

When I was seven or so we went to the American Museum of Natural History and to the gems and minerals hall. Set into the edge of a raised carpeted area, with access from two or three levels for different sized people to access it was a polished touchable giant geode, flat across with deep colors and shine. I slid down it like a playground.

At Mass MOCA in farthest northeast rural Massachusetts Becca and I entered an installation of 1,000,000 pieces of paper, a vast hangar of a space in that repurposed post-industrial museum. Over the course of the exhibit, a few months, the paper steadily fell to form a snowy layer to shuffle through, lay down, make piles, throw paper fights. I liked it at the time, good among many good artworks seen that day, but Becca has remembered it to me every few months or years since then and each time it is mentioned it gets cooler and more important.

Yakima doesn't have much to recommend it. Its a rural county capitol, spread out too much to have much of a city center, crosscut with grain silos and railway spurs, uneasily increasingly hispanic. The Yakima Art Museum was a delightfully tiny and substantial institution. A little old lady took our money, then turned out to be the curator/director/proprietor's mother, helping out for the day. He brought us into collections storage when I told him I worked with Native American Art collections and showed us drawer after drawer of Paiute pottery and arrowheads. Then we wandered off back among the galleries and admired the stagecoaches and neon sign collection.

Yesterday's run destination: Montana Ave.

Yesterday's menu:

breakfast: banana nutella crepes

lunch: leftover quesadilla

dinner: gourmet homemade hamburgers and Kenji's ersatz McDonalds fries