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A Trip to New York

 The Natural History Museum is both the worst and the greatest thing about New York City; it is loud, overpacked, badly organized, and also a portal to pure wonder. 


If you compare it to our nearby Newark Museum, it's like you're comparing "Per Se" to Domino's Pizza. It's one of the main reasons that the city itself seems so magical, to everyone living in every other portion of the United States.


My son is addicted to movement, and I have to just believe that he is absorbing some of what I read while he is running around. This could possibly be true, because he recently disclosed that he knows the words to some portions of "The Music Man," and he is also becoming familiar with bits of "Showboat." So I try to narrate what I see in museums, and I try to be accurate; that said, my heart goes out to the parent who lazily declares that "tigers are found in Africa." Or the parent who confidently states that polar bears live together with penguins at the South Pole.


Seeing the elephant seals on W. 80th Street, I very much want to talk about Ernest Shackleton. "He took a boat toward the South Pole.....but his crew became trapped in the ice, and they had to twiddle their thumbs for a full year. It was like a horror movie. They all thought they might need to eat one another. Elephant seals were friendly but leopard seals would pop up and bare their fangs? I think? Something like this? And the sea was like the worst sea on the planet; it was like a living thing, a monster, so you couldn't just take off in a little rescue boat." I don't have my facts straight, so I keep this jumbled story in my head. But maybe next time....


After the chaos, my family and I retreat to Shake Shack, which is another great wonder of the world. Fries and shack sauce; the fabulous ad for the "Shackmeister Ale." I have some "space center" PTSD, but perhaps it's worth the effort. Visions of meteors and iguanodons are (I think) dancing in two tiny heads....












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