1. [Note: These stories happened while I was staying in Brooklyn for much of January. As with much of this blog, these stories deal with race.]

January 9, 2010, Brooklyn Museum:

My dear friend Lynne has taken the train from Boston early this morning so that she and I can go to the Brooklyn Museum—she especially wants to see Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party,” part of the museum’s permanent exhibit since 2007.

It’s a Saturday; the place is packed. As so often happens in NYC, I am again struck by how many more people of color are here (the same thing happens on the subway, in the supermarket, etc, etc.) . That we’re in a museum begs me to consider how often I see anyone except white people in Boston’s cultural institutions. Answer: very, very few.

After Lynne and I sate ourselves on Chicago’s sumptuous banquet (Overhead: a little girl, wisely held in her mother’s arms, asks: “Can I sit there?” “We can all sit here,” her mother tells her.), we wander through other exhibits, opting out of the “Who Shot Rock and Roll” show because it’s so packed.

We find ourselves in a large exhibit hall adjoining a glass and steel storage area containing shelves and shelves of beautiful stuff. Already reeling from taking in so much—”museumitis”—although I’m curious to see what’s in this sort-of-displayed-but-not-really gallery, I don’t walk in.

But I reflect, as I did re the treasures I’d once found on Lynchburg’s Legacy Museum of African American History shelves: What gets displayed in any museum? And who decides?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/03/books/03book.html?pagewanted=2&hp

January 8, 2010, Greenwood Park, Brooklyn:

My grandson Dmitri arranges clumps of icy snow  in the dead-middle of the paved, spacious, open area of the park: “You’re building an igloo,” I say. He looks at me quizzically. So I realize he doesn’t know what an igloo is.

When we return to his family’s apartment, he sits on my lap and, together, we watch a 7-minute segment of “Nanook of the North” in which Nanook and his family build an igloo from scratch.

Which reminds me of a time maybe 40 years ago in the Central Park zoo when a peacock had unfurled his magnificent tail and the grandmother standing next to me had commented to her grandson: “Look! Just like TV!” ( A word of explanation for those too young to remember the early days of color TV. The NBC logo had been a stylized peacock opening his segmented tail, one color/segment.)

How I’d sneered at that grandmother! For right in front of us, in all his glory, had been a real peacock. Yet she’d referenced something fake, cartoonish, as seen on TV.

40 years later, I show my grandson a UTube video to illustrate the world “igloo.” And, I realize as we watch together, many of his references will be understood by his staring at a computer screen. And, indeed, as my time in Brooklyn progresses, he and I will watch many videos illustrating something that he and I had talked about. “Gram,” I realize, means the person who loves to google videos.

But  one thing Dmitri does experience in living color: He knows, hangs out with, plays with a “rainbow” of people—as he would say. Very unlike my lily-white childhood.

Praise be!

I understand something else: “Nanook of the North” was the first documentary I’d ever seen (Yes, I know there’s controversy re its staging; I’m not denying that), i.e. my first experience of watching people whose lives were utterly different from my own.

[I've been in Brooklyn for the part 3 1/2 weeks tending grandchildren. Here's the first of 11 stories, most of them having to do with race, from my NYC experience.]

January 7th, Park Slope, Brooklyn, about 9am:

It’s really, really cold, I’m staying in a wonderful apartment with iffy lighting and I’ve lost my gloves. So while buying light bulbs at the CVS on 9th Street, I think: “CVS sells everything. I’ll bet they have cheap, warm gloves.” But where?

I see a young man of color in his early twenties, maybe, stocking shelves. One glance at his rounded, doughy, vacant face and I decide: “Don’t ask him.”

“Hey,” I scold myself. “Don’t be so quick to judge. Give the kid a chance.”

So I ask him where to find gloves.

“Follow me,” he says authoritatively. But where does he lead me? To the large, open area at the front of the store in front of the cash registers where five or six people wait to be served. Standing a good ten feet from the cash register counter, behind the waiting people, he yells over their heads, “Where  the gloves at?”

“What kind?” shouts one of the cashiers. Also young. Hispanic, perhaps. (Whether or not Spanish is her first language has nothing to do with this story, BTW; but since, in these stories, I’m talking about race and my own interactions around this charged subject, feel as though I am obligated to identify everyone’s ethnicity.)

At first I wonder why the hell she’s asking what kind. Later I wonder if she had been thinking I might need rubber gloves.

“Warm,” I shout, feeling very, very silly. Exposed. “Cheap.”

“Naw,” she shouts. “We ain’t got none.”

All the waiting customers turn to look at me. One older white woman says, “There’s a discount store at the end of this block. You’ll find just what you need.”

And she was right.

Wearing my new warm, cheap gloves, I walk back up 9th Street passing the CVS on my way. An older white man calls to me: “Dja get your gloves?”

I beam back at him, wiggle my snuggly-warm fingers.

Lessons:

1. New Yorkers sometimes do act like friendly villagers and, I suspect, yearn for little, pleasant interactions with other people—just like the rest of us.

2. I also suspect that young CVS shelf stocker is developmentally delayed. But I, so very, very yearning for, ya know, Truth, Beauty, World Peace, Racial Justice et al, was not able to act upon what my first instinct was telling me. Oh, no. “We thought she was just another guilty white woman,” Reverend Owen Cardwell once said of me. Sometimes I still am.

I’m off to Brooklyn for 3 weeks to be an extra pair of arms for my 2 grandchildren—and their laundry.  So, no new posts for 28 days.

But when I return. . .

A bitterly cold wind rattles my study window; warm and cozy, I send out a prayer for all who must be outside on this frigid day. In these last, chilled days of the “Aughts,” like lots of people, I’m thinking about next year and what—besides losing holiday poundage—I ought to do more of in 2010.

And I think it comes down to a major theme of Way Opens: trying to “stay awake,” i.e. trying to be ever-mindful of the unfair, layered, systemically racist world I so comfortably live in.

And, as someone I know recently observed, someone who really is amazingly mindful, staying awake is exhausting. So the other major “ought” is taking better care of myself. Yikes.

What are your oughts?