A day at the museum
Friends. We meet early-ish in the morning at W.'s house in Utrecht for coffee, a chance to see his daughter again. He is the first of us to have a child and W. has been training her to recognize his friends through an old holiday photograph. Although I don't look much like the person I was then, she recognizes us and smiles as she points.
When we leave, his child says bye bye, and a deep, commanding part of my soul tells me I must procreate. I think this more and more often these days. It's one of those pre-thoughts, ignorant of diapers and sleeplessness.
The museum is part of a refurbished estate. Modern. Spacious, as if the building itself functions as an additional border around the artworks. Room to dream. We’re close to the North Sea, in the dunes, surrounded by grass fields and a forest.
Four of us, a few days after Christmas, are in a throng of well-dressed Sunday People.
Sunday People are just like all other day people, but the shoulders slacken, the smiles get a little easier, gaits slow, there’s time for a chat, and even grandpa's silliness doesn't annoy Sunday Mom and Sunday Dad the way it would get on the nerves of their Tuesday selves.
Because we are in our thirties now, we each have had things to deal with, feel through, process, smile about, and discuss our respective Christmases as things that were endured and enjoyed. How many did you have? One friend asks the other. Two. One at her parents. One at mine. We decided only to do one, the other friend says. The food was good. Another friend says he made a steak for his mother. And at his dad they had Indonesian, which his dad made. We all know his dad. And we all imagine the food would have been delicious.
The Sunday People we move through queue up for a row of Staffordshire figurines of the Devil created by Nick Cave during Covid. His mother died the day he started making them. In a video played at the exhibit, Nick explains that his wife told him to 'Get to work', as a way to say: 'I know you, you will deal with it through your art, I love you, be yourself'.
Partners like that, you'll give anything.
We chat about the Devil briefly in between conversations of our lives. Difficulties, joys, like the Devil's seventeen stations, we have diverged and come to stations of our own, and time with friends gives us room to observe, compare, and reflect. We're alright. Alive. Hurting.
In the classical serenity of that museum, there are countless versions of ourselves among the Sunday People. Old, lonely, grey, curious, ruffled, childlike, fun, running, strolling. Sisters with the same transparent thick glasses and short hair, one calling the other to a painting to say it looks just like Richard.
A man dressed sharply with strawlike grey hair and the friendly eyes of an old cowboy walking with his hands behind his back past a photographer's collection of overweight nudes, animals and cigars. The man carries a dirty little smile I hope to have when I reach his age.
A young lad in round glasses stands by a rainbow light sculpture as his mother asks him to pose, a little more to the left. Now smile, smile, smile Jeremy! He is smiling or trying to.
Belgian accents, French, hard Dutch from The Hague, gentle whispers between lovers, men with crossed arms, artists leaning in to study some technique.
We split up and now and then I run into one of my friends. We tell each other about some silly painting, a funny picture, something impressive. They remind me that I am not alone in the company of pictures and paintings and sculptures and light and retired people.
We eat pancakes after, and discuss with a little more lightness our things in life. W. tells us he biked to the supermarket with his daughter in the front seat by the handlebar.
"It was cold, you know, last Saturday? Yeah, and I'd forgotten to put gloves on her hands. So we're cycling there, and her hands shiver. She moves her hands to my hands and wedges them in the warmth of my palms, as if we are steering this thing together."