A Card Catalog

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MoMA garden.

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2011, Jessie’s first Dyke March

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graduation

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peach couch

When your brain’s all topsy-turvy, maybe try saying an atheist prayer to Maira Kalman for principles of uncertainty, elements of style. Her tonic always puts my bleh mood to rights again. Just one page in her books unwrapping layer upon layer of pastels that would make Key West turn lime-green with envy. Alternate worlds a synesthesiac could love. The jumbliest, grittiest New York street scene or claustrophobic prewar apartment refracted into sweetly-tilted planes of color. Slightly tart like a clever friend in conversation, the artist’s hand. It imprints on your heart a cheery feeling. How oddly-shaped and yearning our human lives are! Stretched out on the peach couch with one of her books smoothing out my jaded eye Just as nice, I think, as meditating or going to yoga. Hello to dourest old dowager, absurdist but apropos pronouncements, hoarder-neurotic’s humor, we meet again. Everything so like life on this island and couch. Except a just-mixed zest of tenderness like the most beautiful pistachio ice cream, rose-water macaroon.

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Small Things

On the Met website they have up a most comforting, personal audio-visual tour. It’s a curator telling her stories and free-associations about “small things” in the Met’s holdings! Her narration reminds me of my experiences going to museums with Mom—always the token afterwards, which I, too, could fit in my pocket; more often than not a tiny animal (especially the scarab beads, so painful to part with even in adulthood), or miniaturized replica of large-scale artwork. Touching in the audio how the woman’s voice changes (the real breaks through) when she’s talking about the Bolivian poncho, small enough for a Barbie to wear, and also her smooth recovery of polish by redesribing it as an artist’s maquette. Love maquettes too, both as concept and word. Some people are miniaturists, I guess. This explains the Met watch I got on my last visit (without Mom)—my fate was sealed by the tiny hippo trapped in endless circles around the watch face. The hippo mesmerized me, I swear! Because, get this, it’s a miniaturized version of the already miniaturized figure. I’ve known the original’s name, William, since I was nine; murmur it like an incantation whenever I’m in the Egyptian wing. It’s not waterproof, my new watch, so it’s also an endless pain. But it’s a small thing that makes me happy. Foggy ticktock recalling happy, early memories: my family’s alltogether adventures in New York.

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end of summer daisies, fdr drive