Postcards from February break
Gil and I went to the Smith College Museum of Art on Wednesday, partly because he’s been asking, partly because they have a new exhibit about drawing that I wanted to see, and partly because it was February break and if we didn’t leave the house at least once a day, I started to lose my marbles. Without meaning to, we arrived half an hour early, something that has never happened to us in our history of going places. It was late morning and the campus was bustling, which always fills me with a life-giving feeling. (Energy? Is that what it’s called?) Gil pointed to a stately building and asked, “What’s in there?” and I explained that a college was a school and that it was a building with classrooms for professors and students. He said, “Professors?” with a tinge of wonder because “the Professor” is the name of a character on his favorite episode of Scooby-Doo—the one from 1969, with the mummy—which he’s seen a hundred times. I think it was news to him that a prof was a thing independent of Hanna-Barbera.
To kill time, we walked the long way around the quad to the new Maya Lin-designed library and as we were walking in, a professor-seeming man held the door for us. He then hurried off with his messenger bag and Gil and I walked into a dream.
It was like being inside an AI library. Like a stock photo of a modern college library, with classical touches of open balconies lined with books. It was so colorful and sunlit and g.d. beautiful.
We took the elevator all over the place, as usual, and when we were finally leaving, we passed a large, darkened classroom full of thirty or forty students looking up at a gigantic screen. The professor-seeming man who’d held the door for us stood behind a table, waving a clicker around. Gil noticed him too, and under his breath he said, “The confessor.”
The new birdseed from the hardware store has mealworms in it, so now we get bluebirds at the feeder. They are sky blue with pink tummies and look like they are on their way to perch on Snow White’s finger. I forgive them the mealworms, obv.
Archaeologists in Egypt uncovered a pharaoh’s tomb for the first time, meaning for the first time in modern history, I guess.1 It belonged to someone called Thutmose II, which when I read it in my head sounds like Utmost the Second, which is a name I really like. The ceiling of the tomb was painted blue with yellow stars, like just another childhood bedroom with a glow-in-the-dark sky.
The other morning I got up around six, opened my curtain and saw the International Space Station gliding across the sky like a very slow shooting star. I resisted the urge to google to confirm what I was seeing, and waved.
People must have known it was there for, like, hundreds of years, right?