Johns: Kerry and Lavery

Today we went to the National Gallery. Before we checked out the 20th century Irish art-- which includes paintings by Jack Yeats, WB's bro-- we had lunch at the cafe. Evan was busy charming the older couple sitting next to us. The lady was wearing little clock-shaped earrings and she had an asymmetrical haircut, two things that mean: I have a career in the arts. Unique jewelry and weird hair always give it away.

So, she leaned over to me and asked, "Does your baby like art museums?" I said I hoped so, because we did. Her husband was smiling and nodding along. "It's good to expose kids to art early," he said, "because they grow to have an appreciation of it." I agreed heartily. She showed me some postcards from the German Romanticism exhibit and recommended that we go; she cautioned that it shouldn't be too expensive because there was a family price available.

Then, her husband did something very strange. He reached into his pocket, cupped an object in his palm, and flashed it at Andrew and I like a secret police badge. It was a John Kerry button. "You voted, right?" he asked, both optimistically and accusingly. "We can't let this go on anymore. It's terrible what's happening to the country..." I assured him that we turned in our absentee ballots before we left, and that we, too, were a Kerry family.

What's strange about this occurence is NOT that we met some other Americans in Dublin and had a conversation with them about America. What's strange is that somehow this guy trusted it would be OK to brandish his badge to complete strangers. I don't think he assumed we'd vote Kerry just because we're American. It was a more complex assumption: layered with deductive reasoning, and perhaps certain traces of presumption, as well. We are a young family, living abroad, avid attendants of museums of all kinds (at least when they're free), eating lunch at a cafe whose proceeds support the museum, and on and on-- did he guess that I listen to NPR, and that when abroad I search for the station most like NPR? Or did he guess from my patchouli smell that my kid eats organic baby food and I buy free trade coffee? Whatever set of assumptions he developed about us were all right by me.

It could've gone horribly wrong for him in the wrong type of setting, but this guy knew it was right. It was OK to flash Kerry-ism in our eyes. We flashed it right back. It was a cool feeling to be reminded that we are an important part of a specific American community. Maybe he wanted to make sure we knew that we could be a force of change, even when living away.

We spent most of our time in the museum looking at the 20th century Irish art. There was one painting, called The Artist in his Studio, by John Lavery, that used Velasquez's Las Meninas as a compostional model. Now, I've seen both these paintings, and I think it's a very interesting point. However, Lavery's is missing a key amusing feature that Las Meninas does have. Whoever can tell me what Lavery's is missing wins a very luxurious prize.

I do like the Lavery painting so much that I will buy a poster of it and maybe hang it where ever our nomadic wandering take us next.

When we came home, Evan practiced crawling. He gets up on all fours and rocks back and forth. Then he whines in the general direction of whatever he's after-- a toy, Dad's keys, etc.-- in hopes that the object will sprout legs and walk over to him. When he's pretty sure that won't happen, he takes a few crawling steps toward the object, reaches for it, grabs it, and then plops down onto his stomach in complete exhaustion. I ask you, is this drama?