I walked to the met looking for Dad last week. I did my best to conjure the past. I listened to brit pop from the eighties as I strode through the park. I wore a velvet jacket he always loved and black leather boots he never saw but would have coveted. Booted and suited he would say, were he to see me today, “Ah. Darling. Luminosa. Principessa. You are a vision. A revelation. Look at you, booted and suited.”
As I walked I felt the past moving hand in hand with the present. I could feel time, flexibly bending to meet itself in two places at once. I knew he was not there on the steps waiting for me and still, I was walking to meet him. As I begin to write the book of us and the story of our time together; which is really the story of my adulthood, I want to reach for him. I want to meet him at the steps of the museum on a cloudy chilly day in my red velvet blazer and hear ‘Ah. Darling.’ I want to laugh and look at grecian sculpture and then Saint Joan on the second floor and then ‘get the fuck out of dodge’ because really ’40 minutes in the met is probably 39 too many. It becomes claustrophobic after a little while, Darling, don’t you think?’
And I do.
But I arrived and of course it wasn’t then, it was now. He wasn't waiting on the stairs, the stairs were closed for an upcoming event and the crowds were thick along the sidewalk. They’ve redone the Greco-Roman and Byzantine sections and I couldn't find what I was looking for. What used to be a vaulted grand hallway filled with sunlight and sculpture had become small dark rooms filled with artifacts.
So, I sat at a table in the Petrie Court Cafe which didn’t used to be a cafe but a series of chairs by the glass doors that led out to the park. The doors used to be open but now they’re locked. The area used to be empty, but now it’s full. So, I got a gluten free bundt cake ( a deeply unsatisfying as a treat) and a small but expensive lemon seltzer and sat at a small round table holding those things in one hand and a remembered cappuccino and conversation on a brisk fall day more than 20 years ago with Dad in the other
Next to the table but not the table exactly because there wasn’t a table, not then. A different table. A nearby statue. But was it? What was it? And when? And what did we speak about? And why did I go? Why am I here now, alone with a pasty cake and an extravagant seltzer? What was I hoping to find?
I went to the museum to summon him and was met with irritation. There was nothing for me here. I dumped the pasty bundt cake and finished the seltzer and got up to walked back toward Byzantium and as I put the napkins in my pocket (waste not want not, after all) three feathers fell out of my pocket. three.
Oh, hi Dad.
Feathers. He always said that when you found a feather in your path it meant an angel was watching out for you. We used to collect them in tiny glasses all over the house. When my brother and I cleaned out his tiny living space after his death, we found several containers filled with them. My brother took one, I took the other. My container of feathers sits on my desk now. Sometimes my children pick them up and exclaim with delight, “An Opa feather!” and they feel him and his love and his life and we all think for a moment that perhaps he is the angel watching out for us and feel lucky.
Sometimes I pick them up for myself. I don’t remember picking these three up, but I must have because here they are.
Sometimes when we go hunting in the past for parts of ourselves all we receive are reminders that what we seek can’t be found until we stop looking.
Absolutely love the last line. Thank you for the reminder.
Stunning