The AGO and I lose our identities
I don’t know what it is in me but I really find it hard to relate to people whose internet handles are things like “momtohedwig” or who have massive sig files with tickers and flashing icons about their kids. Even though, from my mother’s group, I know people who have done those things and are perfect normal - well-rounded, even - in real life. It’s so contextual - who cares if someone identifies themselves as mother in a parenting forum??? I shouldn’t.
And yet, it still grates. Maybe in part because my brain is like theirs in that it is often consumed with the minute worries and details of parenting, and I fear the results over time.
~~~
On to the minute details: Noah is all recovered from his fever, so it must have been the MMR (no rash, so not roseola). His sleep hasn’t been that great, possibly ’cause we’ve tried to keep him quieter (ha). And I think we will start nightweaning in May sometime, that far ahead because Carl and I will have to harden our hearts against the dramatics.
~~~
Yesterday afternoon Noah was so fine that we thought we would take him to the AGO to be quietly pushed around and look at the Emily Carr exhibit. Emily Carr has to be one of the most assuredly safe art things to take a kid too, right?
We’ve had a membership since two weeks before he was born, because I imagined that I would take the bucolic babe to gaze at the pictures and then, while he slept, write great novels. What I have learned since then is that I should have done this immediately after he was born, instead of being scared of germs and transit and things, because the calmly gazing at art phase passes awfully fast.
I think we’ve gone three times actually, and that counts the time I went all the way downtown only to remember/discover that it wasn’t open that day. But we renewed the membership anyway, because hope springs eternal in Carl’s and my hearts that we will spend our weekends in the service of art, and not at the service counter at Wal-Mart.
The AGO is ungoing massive, massive (and controversial, controversial) renovation, and as a result it’s really sort of like going to visit the AGO’s cousin, some smaller little gallery somewhere in the middle of a construction zone. The staff were weary of pointing people in the right direction, but regardless the very friendly security guy told us to take Noah down to the kids’ area. We glibly thanked him and took Noah up the ramp to the remaining gallery and the Emily Carr exhibit.
I always forget how vibrant Group of Seven art is in person; the prints that you see just about everywhere in banks in Canada are muted, somehow, and intellectually remote. But when you see a really good print or in this case, originals, the depth and colour brings it back to the actual landscape, where the scene may be remote but the emotion is so present. (I also am poorly enough educated on Emily Carr that I hadn’t realized she did so much sort of ethnographical painting, so her earlier stuff was astounding to me)
Noah, of course, would have none of the stroller and marched up the ramp and all about the gallery himself. I think he would have done fine; he was really into the Alex Colville painting of a woman in a bath outside of the exhibit and into the Emily Carr paintings, until he saw “Totem Mother“ (scroll down that page a bit). And this reminded him that he was my baby, as he signed frantically, and that I should be nursing him! Well, we don’t nurse in public any more so I sat on a bench and offered him a contraband sippy cup, and he was only offended.
So Carl took him out, and I wandered a bit longer, but it was really not any fun without them. I have many moods (Lyr does too) where wandering art on my own would be blissful, but I was in family outing mood, so I rejoined them. As it turned out Carl had taken Noah to the sculpture area where there is a modernist sort of nude with massive breasts the size of my head, but Noah had spotted the belly button (!!!!) first and was all into that. After a hushed conference we decided to just leave (wow! 15 minutes at the exhibit!) But on our way out the same security guard re-suggested that we go to the kids’ area, even though the kids’ art programme for the day was over.
So we skulked down the hallway to the room and it was fantastic. There’s a construction/installation there called “Bugs and dragons” which is like a dragon sculpture made out of toolboxes and bits, and inside the toolboxes they store amazing toys like straws with the connectors to build with, and they have massive bean-bag sort of pillows, and things to climb on, and great big plastic bugs. So we played there for about half an hour, and I only said about 20 times “why have we not been coming here all winter!)
And then I felt a bit of a pang, because - yeah. Emily Carr upstairs. Toys downstairs. There I was with the toys. Eeek!
But that is how it is, these days. I felt a deep kinship with the walls of the gallery: like I too have my collection mostly in storage, with an exhibit here or there, displayed against the palid backdrop of a wall that hides the renovating beneath. Except I suspect that I will not be reopening so soon, nor with such bold extensions of my original boundaries.
~~~
Then we stopped at our former hangout restaurant near Carl’s and my old workplace, where I used to sit for an hour and nurse a beer and an order of spring rolls until he got there and then we would have dinner and get the leftovers as takeout and overtip and where they still, yesterday, knew to ask me if I was getting the rice noodles with black bean sauce (yes).
But this time, Noah had a grilled cheese, and then he wanted to go watch the streetcars and Carl took him and I sort of rushed through the noodles and there was none of the peace that as a neighbourhood spot, I used to enjoy. And afterwards Carl felt ill and thoughts of food poisoning entered my mind (it’s sort of that kind of place, although we never ever once had an issue there) and it seemed so risky to have taken Noah there and to have fed him other bits off our plates, just for the purpose of having a full sit down family meal under $20. Including a beer.
But I wouldn’t trade the day away for anything.
Comments
Leave a Reply