And now, enter my dear little one- Ava. Well, she's been there before. But this past week was the first time she took the kind of interest that history and art explorers take, and she became a proper Met lover. Going there with her was something of an experience. We have shed the carriage as I've become totally bored with it and Ava has demonstrated a wild interest in walking. But at 2 & 1/2 it was a bit ambitious to think that she can walk the 5 long avenue blocks and 3 short blocks that we had to from where I found parking (for free!) to where the museum is. But she walked, in the freezing chilly as ice wind, she walked.
Approaching the Met from 85th St is a sweet experience because once you turn the corner, its monumental grandness looms in front of you much like a mountain suddenly rises from a plain. The giant building is set against the beautiful Central Park and it rises above its treetop line. Then there are the majestic stairs. We always have an incredible experience at the stairs. It's a magical place. In the summer musicians come and draw crowds and in the winter, tourists feed crowds of pigeons. Ava promptly chased a flock of those resilient city birds and they flew up over her head but only as a tease, landing just a few feet away. Then Ava did something that sort of took me by surprise. She climbed all of the stairs completely by herself (!). By the time I took my gloves off and turned the camera on, she was already at the top, at the main entrance frame by two superbly large columns. The light changed at that moment and everything around me shone with a little more contrast, as the sun rays fell at a sharp angle, the sun already behind the museum.
Once inside, we felt like were the fashionable latecomers to a fancy ball. That't the effect that the marvelous airy lobby has on the unsuspecting visitor. It always has that effect on me, no matter how many times I go there. We checked our coats, gave our dollar each (yes, the ticket price of 15 per person is only suggested, which is totally awesome) and opened the map. That is some map! Ava had so much fun with it- tracing with her finger my suggested route and pretending to be a character from her favorite cartoon Umizoomi who is going to look for the treasure.
And looked we did. We started in a somewhat narrow gallery that contains liturgical objects from Byzantium, the empire that included my birth country Bulgaria prior to its founding in 681. It felt immediately personal, immediately deep. As an Orthodox Christian and a believer, I was standing in front of a Processional Cross from the 6th century and thus in front of 14 centuries of faith. The space was quiet and intimate and I felt an immediate connection to the people who must have labored over its intricate details as well as the people who must have walked after it on holy days, on streets less paved than ours and with shoes less fancy, perhaps, yet with hearts just as full of yearning and complex emotions.
Ava settled in a nook between two panels with engravings that spoke to my heart (picture bellow). Their simple yet timeless designs were reminiscent of ritual bread making as on Bulgarian Christmas Eve (Bydni Vecher, Бъдни Вечер).
Hours of exploration flew by and this little girl stomped on and asked me to read the tag of display after display after display. We flew through Medieval, then a visiting Venetian glass modernist collection, took a loop of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, and ended up in Greek and Roman Art. We had seen roughly 1/12th of the museum and I was exhausted. Four hours had disappeared in observing, dreaming and learning. On our way to the car, we stumbled upon the Big Daddy's diner, the perfect spot to wrap up the outing in a candy dream environment.
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