28 bar rises 30.06 5mph N windchill 28
First Quarter Moon of Winds
Yesterday I had tours with a group of 4th graders from Hastings and 1st graders from Apple Valley. Though these tours don’t race the intellectual engine, they are fun. These kids are thoughtful, attentive and excited about the art that they see. It refreshes my eye each time I do one of these tours because the kids see things I don’t see and make conjectures about the works that don’t occur to me.
An example of the latter is a discussion I had with the kids from Hastings about the Fanatics of Tangiers. Delacroix painted a Sufi sect as it engaged in an ecstatic dance to reach the wisdom of their saint. (BYB-Fanatic is ethnocentric, not to mention xenophobic, but it is the name of the painting.) The kids looked at the sect and imagined that the group surging foreward through the streets (the sect) might be being chased by animals; or, perhaps the people who stood around had sent an army to the crowd’s village and chased them back here.
Another great thing about tour days is the opportunity to connect with docent classmates and to make new friends from among the docent corps. Today Stacy, Careen, Annie, Sally and Wendy were there. They reveal, among them, the infinite variety our species takes, even among those who appear so similar. All white, all well-educated and with one exception upper middle class at least, these women vary a lot in their personal details. Stacy’s husband runs and owns a business recharging ink cartridges while she works at a Lutheran church in various capacities. Careen is a Quebecois, an architect and a physician’s spouse like me. Annie’s husband is from Lagos, Nigeria and contracted malaria while there. Annie’s adopted. Sally is a retired trainer and organizational development person whose daughter almost drowned in a ferry sinking off the coast of Thailand not too long ago. Wendy has bright kids, and married an Italian. She’s works on her conversational Italian for trips to the see the in-laws.
Lunch with Frank. We went to the Black Forest where we were the only customers in the dining room except for a couple at the very far end next to 26th Street. We both had sausages and we both knew better. We talked about travel, serious illness, Aramaic and the silliness, if it weren’t so damned serious, of the late stage Democratic primary race.
