Back from New York

Jenny, Elena and I spent five days (actually, four full days and six nights, plus flight time) in New York City and got back yesterday. Traveling with a twenty-two month old was wonderful and frustrating. The opportunity to see the world again through utterly fresh eyes is one of the great privileges of parenthood, of course, but the counter to that is that one's own visions of how one is going to experience things tend not to work out as planned. The Museum of Natural History's dinosaur bones and dioramas were perfect places to point at things and ask Elena "What's that?" She's at a point where she has enough categories to place things in that she can come up with a plausible, and sometimes creative, answer to almost any question like that (so for example she tended to identify dioramas of antelope or deer as "cows," "goats," or "horses" even as she internalized the words I said to her, "antelope" or "deer" or better, "koodoo" or "okapi"). She's also a bit obsessed right now with sea creatures, and spent a lot of time looking at fish or the remains of fish in the museum as at the Central Park Zoo. In fact, she spent as much time looking for a sticker on the floor with a picture of a sea star (aka starfish) that happened to be repeated throughout the dinosaur exhibits to point toward a special exhibition, as she did on anything else, running excitedly to the next sticker and sitting down on the floor to look closely at it each time.

The other side of the coin was that I saw a lot of the paintings I was hoping to see, but for no more than five or ten seconds at a time. Matisse's Red Studio, Picasso's Demoiselles D'Avignon,
the huge Kandinsky paintings, the vast Pollock, all at the MOMA, and then the Van Eyck and Workshop Last Judgement at the Met, were all seen with half an eye. I was able to take a bit more time in the Neo Rauch exhibition, and looking at some of the twentieth century work at the Met -- maybe Elena was napping. Warhol's monumental Mao was one of my favorites.