On the UWS there's a Children's Museum, which today felt a little shabby, which today seemed more like three floors of rent and $10 times x visitors a month. They'd closed off the third floor for some kid's birthday party and there must have been 150 kids crammed into the other two floors. Dora and Boots and Diego still smiled but they all looked a little exhausted, there on the walls, putting exuberant Spanish-lite to kid after kid after kid. They must have felt like they were phoning it in. Al rescate sounds so sad when it's only mumbled, when it channels only the vocal cords and no heart.
Hung back and watched N. playing with other kids with these giant blocks and sometimes in the interactions of kids you see it all: How one can ignore the vision of another to fulfill her or his own. How one kid's block tower is another kids raw materials, all in quick time.
How every New York neighborhood is always at least three at once, the one it was, the one it is, the one it's on its way to becoming. How empires are the same, built from those of the past, then picked coldly for the best scraps to form new ones.
The joy of that metaphor being that today my kid was a little emperor, building a tower for the ages, beneficent, the best ruler this town has ever seen, with trumpets and saxophones and drums and bass and guitar to herald a new reign, redolent with young joy, a kingdom bound felicitous under imagined starlight.
skip to main |
skip to sidebar
