The Great Adventure - Day 2 - August 6, 2009

Five years ago Stacy's cousin Valerie Foster, her husband Jack and daughter Kara came to California for Thanksgiving. (Actually Valerie is Stacy's Mom's cousin, so I guess that makes her and Stacy first cousins once removed and makes Stacy and Kara second cousins.) Stacy hadn't met them before, at least not since she was old enough to remember, so we were both essentially meeting them for the first time.

We all had Thanksgiving dinner up at Stacy's folks house in Agua Dulce. It was an interesting meal. Stacy's grandmother Ann brought the turkey up from Sun City where she had dutifully cooked it from a deep freeze that morning. Let me suffice to say there are lots of good reasons they tell you to completely thaw a turkey before you try to cook it. She wouldn't be persuaded it wasn't done, so it was carved up and plated out, still jelly-like and translucent in places, and one-by-one everyone made a quiet little visit to either the microwave or the wastebasket hidden around the corner. It was, I recall, a rather awkward meal; Valerie was a food editor for a culinary magazine, so I can only imagine her pain and suffering was considerably more pronounced that ours. But Salmonella aside, we really had a great time with the Fosters, and a day or two after Thanksgiving they came down to our place and we got to hang out some more. We enjoyed them so much we've been hoping ever since for another chance to get together.

They live in Trumbull, Connecticut, so our northbound road trip seemed like just the opportunity. At first, however, the timing looked dubious. Jack and Valerie and the family were leaving for Hilton Head on Friday for vacation mixed with a little on-location planning for Kara's upcoming wedding. We didn't expect it would work out for us to come crash the night before they were to go, but they very generously invited us anyway and made us feel very welcome, so consequently our plan for Thursday was to drive from Trenton to Trumbull.

It is only a three and a half hour drive, and both Jack and Valerie were working Thursday, so we were in no rush. We slept in and then walked to breakfast at a restaurant adjacent to the motel. In the old days every HoJo had a restaurant, so I suspect this restaurant was once part of the motel property. Fortunately severing ties with the motel seemed to have worked in the restaurant's favor, considering the forlorn state of the inn. The restaurant was clean and spiffy and busy with lots of sharp dressed business people and university types. The food was as good as one can expect breakfast fare to be. (I imagine breakfast is a hard meal for anyone in the culinary arena to build a standout reputation on.) We ate and then returned to the room to pack and reload the car. When I went out to the car with the first set of suitcases I found it unlocked with the glove compartment and all the other little compartments open and riffled. On the driver's seat sat an empty 32 oz. bottle of something skunky, wrapped in -- what a cliché -- a brown paper bag. I don't know if I left the car unlocked the night before or someone from a locksmith shop was doing a little extracurricular practice. Fortunately we had brought in everything of any conceivable value (including the car user's guide because I was still trying to figure out the stereo), so rather than getting ripped off, when you think of it we came out a little ahead considering the 5-cent deposit we could have gotten for the malt liquor bottle. I'm thinking it's got to be a pretty rare occasion when you make money by being a breaking-and-entering victim.

A little creeped out, but none the worse for the wear, we finished packing and took to the road. Since time wasn't pressing and the kids were actually enjoying the car ride I decided to forgo the interstates and take surface streets across New Jersey and into the New York City area. It took a little longer but it was really neat to actually see all the towns and townships I'd heard of, but wouldn't have seen from I-95. Stacy, having never been to New York, wanted to at least to see the skyline. I had repeatedly reminded her that as long as I was driving, she'd have no chance in Hades of us actually taking the car into the city, so a drive up the New Jersey side of the Hudson seemed likely to be her best and only option, and she campaigned for it. Once we got to Newark we hopped back on the interstate and from that vantage point we did get to see the Manhattan skyline quite well. I've been to NYC a couple of times since 9/11, even going to the World Trade Center ground-zero site, but it still gives me a cold chill and queasy stomach when I look over at that obviously incomplete outline of south Manhattan.

We had planned out our route the night before, and I knew we were going to take the George Washington bridge over the Hudson and, at least in a superficial sense, actually be in New York, if only for a brief interlude on a safely sheltered highway. As I looked over the maps the night before, however, I was reminded of a museum I had visited once many moons ago, the Cloisters, on the north part of Manhattan island just off the highway immediately after the bridge. I had thoroughly enjoyed the medieval architecture and collection when I saw it seven or eight years ago with my friends David Waring and Caroline Swope. The museum was built through an endowment by John D. Rockefeller in the 30's, but it was built to look like a medieval monastery. It is all spooky stone corridors winding staircases and cloistered gardens. While I was there with Dave and Caroline we stumbled upon a live a-cappella concert by the men's period vocal ensemble Chanticleer and it sounded positively awesome in the cathedral-like chambers. That left an indelible mark on me.

The Cloister's collection of medieval religious art is massive, though nothing it holds is more famous and valued than the renown Unicorn Tapestries, a series 15th century tapestries from the Netherlands that depict the finding, hunting and eventual capture of a wild unicorn, the sequence often interpreted as a Christian allegory. These tapestries are huge and exquisitely detailed. When I was there with Dave and Caroline they had been taken down as part of a multi-year restoration project, so while I'd been to the Cloisters, I'd never gotten to see the tapestries. Once I knew how close we were, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to go and try again to see them.

We paid our $8.00 toll to get over the GW bridge and so set tire on Manhattan. The museum sits in a lush and isolated park at the north end of the island. While it looked easy enough to get to on my map, it proved to be a challenge. I got off the interstate at what I thought was the right road and began heading north on the surface streets. All the vows I'd made to Stacy about not setting foot in New York proper came back to haunt me. The bumper-to-bumper traffic, the ubiquitous double parking, the perpetual bleating of the car horns and the suicidal pedestrians who all but dare you to run them over made it an experience I will never forget and hope rarely to relive. We overshot the museum, and began flailing around back and forth trying to get where we knew it had to be. Eventually we found the right road, but weren't sure if we came upon it too north or too south. We guessed we needed to go north, and needless to say, we guessed wrong. The next thing I knew I was paying a $3 toll to cross the East river into the Bronx, only to turn right around and pay another $3 to get back into Manhattan. But all good panic scenarios must eventually come to an end and after what seemed to be the most pointless bobbing and weaving and turning and crossing of thoroughfares (this time at least, directed by signs promising us the Cloisters eventually), we found the park and museum. I was nearly weeping.

The Cloisters

As I mentioned earlier, the museum is set in a very lush and wooded park. I think they were trying to perpetuate the whole monastic feel with a forest of tranquility in the midst of the bustle of the world's loudest city. It was indeed artificially silent; occasionally one would see a sign on a pole or tree demanding quiet as the area was a meditation zone. We parked in a little lot under one such sign. That was when I came to learn that my rental car had a car alarm. Evidently I did not get to that part of the car manual. Not sure what I did or how I did it, but there we were, all still sitting in the car - I'd barely taken the key out of the ignition - when all of a sudden my car began honking and flashing like giant, mutant goose having a seizure. The sound reverberated off the museum's castle wall and echoed back and forth through the meditation trees. My pulsating headlights spotlit the sign in front of me with a one-beat-a-second strobe effect. "Quiet!" "Quiet!" "Quiet!" "Quiet!" read the sign. I frantically pushed buttons on my remote control key ring and flipped levers and switches on the dash, all to an accompanying wail mounting in intensity from the prepubescent back seat. Finally, using some magic sequence of button pushes, level flips and curse words, the car went suddenly silent, the means of peacemaking being as equally unbeknownst to me as the sequence that initiated the cacophony. I think I sat motionless in the car, barely breathing, for two or three minutes, terrified that anything I did to open a door and get out of the car would only reinstitute the banshee wailing. Somehow or other we managed to eventually extract ourselves from the car without the car noticing and we slipped sheepishly across the meditation zone and into the museum; L was kind enough to point out that the car had been very loud.

We hadn't gotten more than ten feet into the museum when L asked me if there were going to be dragons inside. It did indeed look like you could chance upon a fire-breathing serpent or two in your wanderings, but I tried to assure her that it was exceedingly unlikely. I'm not sure if that comforted or disappointed her. N ignored me altogether and began chanting quietly to himself, "We're gonna see a dragon! We're gonna see a dragon."

I could go into a lot more detail on the museum and its collection and the terrors of bringing a 3- and 5-year-old into close proximity with priceless and generally unprotected works of art, but I'll keep it to a quick (mis)adventure with the crown jewel of the collection, the Unicorn Tapestries themselves. When we first got to the tapestry room there was a tour going through and the room was pretty crowded, so we tried to work our way around the group and get out another door to come back later when it was less busy. We succeeded in this, but still managed to set off the proximity alarm more than once as the kids bobbed and weaved with uncomfortable levels of energy between the tourists and the art. I was sure I was going to jail. We mossied around the museum for a bit, biding our time, knowing that preschoolers have a pretty short half-life when it comes to museums with dusty works of art. Eventually we saw that the tapestry room had emptied out - surprisingly completely. We went in all by ourselves and I spent as many seconds as I could ogling the fabrics. We were just on our way out of the room, knowing we'd pushed the envelope dangerously, when I noticed unmistakable disaster brewing on N's face as he stood within a foot and a half of a tapestry. His head was tilted ever-so-slightly back, his nose was twitching and his mouth was open and trembling, leaking the a slowly building "ah-ah-AH-AH..."

"N! I screamed, "COVER YOUR..." Too late. The "CHOOO!" escaped and in that slow-motion instant I saw N's unguarded sneeze propel thousands of little droplets of mist and goo outward in a graceful arc to impact silently on the unsuspecting unicorn before him. I could not believe it. My son had just hacked a loogie on a 500 year old tapestry! I don't know if the proximity alarms went off or not. I don't remember much at all, actually. All I remember is that, with arms yanked out of sockets, two stunned kids and one utterly perplexed wife were dragged mercilessly out of the room, shuttled down a couple haunted stairwells and whisked at high rates of speed through dragon infested hallways out into the blinding sunlight of escape.

After our flight to the car I was quite pleased to have no repeat from the temperamental car alarm. Locked and loaded, we barreled meditatively from the park, seeking the enlightenment of open freeway and the great beyond. About another hour and a half of exquisite north Manhattan street traffic and local color brought us to the on ramp a mile away and we took off, quite ready to put New York and any Metropolitan Museum of Art security details far behind us.

I can only imagine that 500 years from now there will be some giant controversy regarding the age of the Unicorn Tapestries. You will have some experts assert that they come from the late fifteenth century based on a preponderance of evidence, while others will want to make the case that they are of much younger origin, because DNA testing on one of the tapestries clearly shows proteins dating no later than 2009.

The remainder of the drive to Trumbull was refreshingly uneventful. We arrived at Stacy's cousins' house just before dinner and had a wonderful evening of catching up. We had a barbecue on their back porch which looked out on a little patch of woods probably 30 feet deep that ran the length of their and their neighbors' backyards. L and N were quite intrigued by the woods behind the house and were convinced that they could see numerous glowing eyes looking back out at them.



We had a wonderful time over dinner, talking about family and friends, trading stories and memories. I know Stacy in particular enjoyed learning all the history and piecing together things she hadn't known before. In addition to Jack and Valerie, their son Tim and his wife Kim were there as was there other daughter Kara. L took to Kim and Kara quickly and somehow managed to talk them into letting her have a photo shoot on the family stairway after dinner. I believe there are now, somewhere, a couple dozen pictures of L, besmeared with ice cream in über-dramatic poses of various sort on the stairs.

N, like his Dad, contented himself focusing fully on the ice cream without the need for any side modeling.









Following a second, full-family shoot on the stairs the kids retired to bedrooms where Cousin Valerie stayed up way later than she could afford, reading them books in bed. The kids were quite entranced.

Bedtime stories.

And so ended our first full day of travelling. It was a wonderful time with family, and it certainly isn't everyday you get to mar a priceless work of art.

My apologies that the telling took longer than the living.