Beautiful Day

Did you ever have a day so perfect and lovely that by the end of it you felt as if you'd drunk several glasses of good champagne? That was today.

We had made plans with Hedgehog's special friend, and his parents, to take the children to the Museum of Modern Art. Hedgie had never been to the MOMA before, and it is truly one of the most beautiful places on earth, so I was very excited to introduce her to it. Now, all parents know that often when you're excited about doing something with your child, and perhaps have a lot invested in the event, plans can go wretchedly awry--your kid is cranky, she ends up hating it, it's worse than no fun in the end--but this was a remarkable confluence of really good elements: I adore her little friend, he's just as bright and eccentric and kind as Hedgehog, and they really understand each other, you can see it in the way they hold hands and whisper and discuss books they love and concoct peculiar word games. Even better, his parents are two of my favorite people in the world, a rare couple who are capable of more than just staring at their child and discussing, ad nauseam, his habits...or worse yet, god forbid, real estate...or their jobs...(lord knows I can be as guilty of that)...they are so funny, so acerbic, so worldly without being pretentious, so much more than the sum of their child, their apartment, and their career...

And if I sound like I just came back from a really awesome date, well I did...the museum was splendid, we ate lunch first in the cafe (parents, a visit to the art museum should always begin with lunch or a snack to fortify oneself), roamed around and looked at the Pop Art soup cans and the giant matchbook, and marveled over the Jasper Johns and Seurat, and the strange Louise Bourgeois skinny vagina sculptures, and the children were spell-bound by Rousseau's "Sleeping Gypsy," and asked each other, was the gypsy dreaming of the lion, or was the lion dreaming of the gypsy? Were the lion's eyes gentle or fierce?



and the grown-ups laughed over how much Gaugin liked those native women...so much better than hanging around in Van Gogh's ascetic narrow little bedroom...



And there was more food in the dappled sculpture garden, by the soft noise of the fountains, and so much laughter over the kids' heads...and the kids were tired but full of food and saturated paint colors and the movement of the sculpture...

And the subway ride home was crowded and peaceful, and Hedgehog leaned against me and closed her eyes, and murmured that the rocking was putting her to sleep.

I feel now as if I'd spent a day outside in the sunshine, I'm warm and there's a stillness inside me which is very rare indeed...

It was a beautiful day.