welling tears and octopi

this weekend my friends and i took advantage of Baltimore dollar days. The museums were all a dollar or less to get in. Yesterday we went to the American Visionary Arts Museum. it's a museum for untrained artists. some people call this "outsider art." a lot of the work comes from people who were institutionalized or have mental handicaps. the exhibit was called "out of the mouths of babes." and it focused on art of both the young and the young at heart. some of the eccentric work of the elderly was inspiring because it made you think so much about maintaining the curiosity and awe of the world you have when you are a child even when faced with issues of disease and the question of death before you. it made me realize how much i hope to stay this taken aback by the whole world, all the time.

recently i wrote a little "who i would like to meet" list. and i narrowed it down to "someone who looks forward to the pangs of pain and aching beauty and is constantly surprised by, makes comment on, and could not live without the waves of hilarity and irony that break it all up like driftwood."

and essentially that's what the exhibit was about.

i did, however get a little weepy when we went upstairs. there was one collection of paintings done by a young man who was sexually abused by a camp counselor, found his father had committed suicide, his brother a few weeks later, and then finally himself. one painting in particular was of an oldwoman who was sorrowful, slumped in a chair with another image of a young girl overlapping her. this painting was done on bedsheets with fingers dipped in paint, instead of brushes. a child abuse specialist wroteabout how the painting was of the artist in his old age, saddened by how he lost his childhood. a lot of times, the artist depicted himself as a young girl. the child specialist said this had to do with virginity and fragility of a woman. there was something so eerie about this particular painting, because it was done on a bedsheet, the black background was sort of slipping away. it looked like this old woman was dissolving and dying.
i slipped into a hallway to catch my breath and gather my tears back in before they fell. virginia gave me a little supportive pat on the back. "kiddo" she said. knowing that it was all a little too much to take right then.

which reminds me.

yesterday i wrote two of my not-so-famous-or-popular "very very short poems." i've decided to do a selection of them especailly dedicated to the silent moments in friendship. recently, due to living with my best friend, i have realized how very frequently this happens. two friends who love eachother know eachother so well that they don't have to speak and sometimes in those moments share more than when they do.

here is one of those little poems.

understood

she never sighed or said
but between her chair and mine
the december, 8 o'clock, orange moon
hung heavy and low
too big to believe it was true.


anyway, back to these dollar days.

today the same troop of girls and i made a dash to the National Aquarium here in Baltimore. (it must be funny to read this and be from Baltimore and here me talk so formally about this place....sorry dudes.) the seahorses are leaving soon to go to italy so it was great to see them again. some of them are so tiny they are hard to see and some of them are much larger and colorful. they are amazing. especailly the leafy seadragons. they are twelve inches long and look like a clump of seaweed solemnly floating. seaweed with expression.



jeanne wanted to know if they had an octopus, so we asked this very friendly man near the sting rays. he said that they do have one but it is in some storage area or something. the first thing i pictured was some movie set attack-o-pus that was in a shed like in Ed Wood. I asked what they do in the storage tank. and the man explained that it could be for medical reasons, or restoration of the exhibit. he must of seen my face go "ooooh no, a sick octopus, oh dear!" and he said, "he might be back there just for a check up. " and that satisfied me as a much more adorable answer. ....that is so cute, an octopus check-up. jeanne and i talked about how cute it would be to see them hitting the octopus with a tiny hammer on all of his tentacles. i imagined him with a thermometer hanging out of his smiley face --- oh, see i think it would have been beneficial for me to have seen an actual octopus because apparently i can only think of them as cartoons. as a rule, i have the same trouble with hippos.

after the aquarium the girls and i got paper shark hats and had french fries covered in cheese whiz as we argued about which of the beatles we would date.