Sunday was my mother’s birthday—a Leo, we share the same dishwater blonde curls. We like to say she has a mane, and I, an Aries, have horns. She has a roar and I have a warbling bleeeaahhp.
At the Leo’s request, we went to The Getty Museum, a shimmering block of travertine presiding over the 405 freeway. This is our old haunt. We used to live in Brentwood, in an apartment complex that has since been torn down and replaced by a cookie cutter condominium. The Getty was a 10 minute drive, we could zip up Barrington, over to Church Lane then suddenly you’re paying $20 for parking and telling yourself it’s cool because admission to the actual museum is free. To reach the paintings, sculptures, the garden roughly hewn into an old-fashioned maze, you must board the tram, a two-car cream-colored mini-train. As the tram snakes up the mountain, you are afforded a glimpse of the city from above, a view on par with the million dollar hilltop mansions resting on the other side of the freeway.
I can’t remember when I first visited The Getty, but I must have been six or seven. That initial tram ride felt as revelatory as astronauts describe the mind blowing vision of seeing Earth from Space. We were so high up, I couldn’t find my apartment building, the center of my world. The city was a marvelous dusty carpet, an expensive vintage one with elaborate flourishes and mysterious designs.
We used to arrive just an hour before the museum closed, scurrying across the slippery marble floors to see 13th century illuminated manuscripts before jumping to the next building for a glimpse at Manet and Degas. One evening, we stumbled into a room arranged as though Marie Antoinette was just in the other room washing up. Any minute now she’d burst in, demanding to know why you were standing by her four post bed? And who is that man staring into the gold framed mirror fixed above her ornate dresser, or shall I say armoire?
My imagination did back flips at The Getty, where each piece of art was the oldest thing I’d ever seen and entirely fresh to my LA sensibilities.
The guards would shift from one foot to another, hands clasped over bellies, counting down the minutes until they could ask us to head towards the tram. We were the only ones in the room, on that floor, sometimes the entire building. Going to a museum just before closing is great, because you can’t mess up any shelves that need to be rearranged after your careless touch. There’s no dressing room to destroy with hangers and tangled pants, one leg flipped inside out. Just stay out of the gift shop and you will leave no trace. Everyone clocks out exactly on time.
On my mother’s birthday, we arrived just after noon. The crowds were thick, children played tag in the gallery filled with Dutch masterpieces. Multiple babies cried, as if holding a debate on the merits of Van Gogh’s Irises across the echoing stairwell. It wasn’t long before my mother felt the ground shift from beneath her, exhaustion hitting, and we called it quits. The entire visit was two and a half hours, but it felt like twenty minutes. Such is the power of timeless artifacts.
Every year, when my mother’s birthday rolls around, I am first shocked and then I am grateful. For years, there was so much talk of dying that I split my mind in two: one half constantly praying for her miraculous recovery, the other half preparing for the unfortunate reality that seemed so sure of itself.
But we beat the odds—really she fought them off, barefisted on a cold tile floor. The rookie defeated the defending champ. The crowds went wild. At the press conference, she leaned into the mic, of course sacrifices were made camera flashes pulsating on her hollow bloodied cheeks everything lost was not worth keeping.
The Getty suctions time in half. I remind myself: now, here, July 30th 2023. Walking alongside her in the bright sun, the white stone bouncing light at us from all angles, I almost questioned whether or not this was just a dream.
July 31st usually signals a down shift in the Summer: everyone gather your beach towels, shake the sand from your shoes, wrangle the popsicles from sticky children. But this year, it feels like the Summer waves are still rolling in. Some of them have yet to meet us at the shore. I saw a friend yesterday and she asked me so, what are you going to do this Summer? I laughed, because I understood the feeling, even though we just ran head first into August. I have a spoonful of ice cream poised at my lips, half a sundae left to go.
And really, who cares if I’m dreaming. My dream is different than yours, and yours, and yours. It’s our best most beautiful quality, to proclaim the thousand pinpricks are actually perfectly situated for light to shine in. We form a constellation of these peepshow holes, channels to our past, the inner array of eternal beings, in an effort to share a genuine image of our dream that someone else can finally see.
If I’m dreaming, it’s the most realistic dream ever. All the dreamlike elements are punctuated by realistic notions. In fact it’s bending the conventions of Dream—it’s Wizard of Oz level groundbreaking.
Whatever it is, I’ll take it. I’ll cradle it and hoist it to my shoulders, so it can see beyond me. We’re all just dreaming in one way or another. That’s our second best most beautiful quality. To understand that we’re experiencing something so entirely unexplainable, yet we wake up every day and do it all over again.
So, what are you going to do this Summer?
xx
James
Beautiful - “We form a constellation of these peepshow holes, channels to our past, the inner array of eternal beings, in an effort to share a genuine image of our dream that someone else can finally see.” 💛