Seeds of Insight

“This is my first time.”

The female sales agent responded by giving Ann her full attention. Excitedly she pulled out a brochure and handed it to the overwhelmed woman.  Ann felt her sense of accomplishment; she had just connected with and engaged a new member to the High Museum of Art.

There was a white wall of honor to the benefactors;  Delta, a major sponsor was invisible. It was Sunday afternoon in the middle of the Arts Center, a place Ann had passed at least a dozen times while transferring on the MARTA.

She purchased the ticket which seemed inexpensive at $19.50 and was ready for the membership if only the budget would allow it.

“Go to the lady in the red jacket over there and pick up your headset.” Meghan was patient in her instruction to Ann even as the line extended to the middle of the huge hall.

The tour was too fast and too crowded. It would have been a waste without the audio. As Ann observed the tourists without headsets staring at the paintings, she knew that her tour would have been useless without the sounds. Headsets had become mandatory in her new world.

Ann arrived on the second floor without the headset and there was no tour guide. She felt lost so she returned to the counter on the first floor to seek direction from Meghan. As she approached the counter, she noticed another young woman who had an unusual headset dangling from her right arm. As Ann took the strange gadget in her hand, she started to fidget with the little box that was attached by a sturdy black nylon cord.  Eager to start the tour, she hopped on the elevator back to the exhibit hall.  As the elevator door opened, Ann was stopped in her tracks by another attendant who was trying to tell the visitors that the hall was full and that they should keep moving.

“What?” Ann was not about to rush through the halls and certainly she was not going to miss the message in the first few paintings.

Ann disobeyed and stayed back and away from the male attendant who was moving his “Walkie Talkie” furiously while losing control of the crowd that had piled up between the first painting and the elevator.

“How do I use this thing?” Ann desperate to begin the tour, decided to ask, suspecting that the pale security guard would not be helpful.

“I really do not know…go over there and ask that lady standing at the corner.”  He pointed to a black woman dressed as an usher and who could have been either a fine arts graduate student volunteer or an experienced curator.

The young black woman was patient in her black suit as she instructed Ann. “The first set of paintings do not have audio…the audio begins right here with the first painting you see with a black frame. There is a number to the right of each painting, enter the number into your remote and press ‘go.’ “

“Wow!”  A new world opened up at the High Museum.

“Hmmm. So Dutch paintings were small…”

–

I remembered what The Voice said about the wine glass…

Time…Passage of Time.

Frailty. Wilting flowers.

The Goldfinch by Fabritius, 1654…

As The Old Sing, So Twitter The Young…

Woman Writing a Letter (also with a pearl earring)…exposed and ready to write.

The Dutch with white ruffs around their necks, portraits after marriage; the male poses with his left arm on his hip and the right arm hanging by his side; the female stiff in her black feathery paint.  A little girl so wealthy that her puffy gown and golden necklace are too heavy for her.  I felt sorrow.

Rembrandt 1606 – 1669, Master of Shadow and Light.

Susana, 1636, Naked and highlighted.

 –

A room for The Mauritshuis – the gem of the Dutch Museums.  Not much there.

 –

Vermeer, 1632 – 1675. The Girl with the Pearl Earring – the Dutch Mona Lisa.  “That’s it?” An anticlimax for sure.

 –

Ann left the exhibit hall and found herself into what she thought was a book store.  To her left she saw a book with the same title as the exhibit.  She would buy that one and hoped for a climax.

The air was still when Ann left the museum. A great silence filled the atmosphere with the headsets gone. Suddenly she was deaf and could not hear anything around her.  She walked towards the street where she had seen the musician earlier. Lost, she turned around. How does she find her way back to Atlanta?

Then the musician started to play his trumpet. It was an unknown familiar black song.  He was very slim standing with no face when she noticed him on the way in and a white woman had dropped something into his collection plate. She walked towards the music along the same path she had entered some two or three hours earlier.  As the beautiful sound filled her space, she saw that he was sitting on the ground, appearing tired. She did not want to see his eyes.

Touched by his awesome music, she walked towards MARTA.

_

“Do you know if there is a shuttle around here?”

“A shuttle? Why would anyone need a shuttle?” I asked myself.

“I am sorry. This is my first time here in the Arts Center.” Ann knew they were from different worlds as she was dressed well in rich charcoal black pants almost as fine as the fabric on the Dutch groom.  Senses tangled, Ann wondered if she was a young woman who stepped out of her frame.  I sighed and finally attributed the clarity to my new spectacles.

–

September 23, 2013

“You went!” Susana’s eyes lit the cubicle in a moment that was captured by Rembrandt’s spirit.

There was no need for Ann to reply because the book was sitting on her desk and she was smiling knowing that there was a common thread. 

“They are expanding…in Atlanta. The Mauritshuis is running out of space, hence the exhibit here. You should see the children’s exhibit also.”

“I plan to send my son there alone and then we will go again together.” Ann was not interested to see the children’s exhibit. 

–

When fathers die

I was 24 when we buried my father.  It was three years after I migrated to the United States.  I was recently separated from my first husband, with a young son, a freshman in college living in a tiny apartment in Teaneck, New Jersey, commuting at least forty miles to my part-time job as a medical records clerk in an old white Pontiac Firebird I was able to buy with a loan from the bookkeeper at my job.

I was only nine years old when he died.

As I sit here, I am thinking about all the church sisters who are experiencing the loss of their fathers, the laughing wives whose husbands are away on mission trips, wounded wives of husbands whose lives have been disrupted by the impact of the ongoing recession, female divorcees who smile alone, the sick woman sitting on the metal chair with her head held in her hands, and those of us who are fatherless immigrants.

As women who have encountered loss, we start again “tomorrow as their maid.”  If we do well, we will be paid modestly and “we will live with them.”