Return of Memoryfest - Day 7/31

[bironic]

I owe some of you comments and will get to them, but not tonight. Am sick, I think. Or have a bizarre mid-winter allergy, which I suppose wouldn't be too bizarre after all, seeing as how it hit 70 degrees today.


7. Kindergarten

When I was five or six, my father needed to go to L.A. on business, so my family took a trip there. We visited the La Brea Tar Pits museum. Inside were exhibits on the pits, life-sized models of woolly mammoths and animations of extinct animals deep in the tar, straining to pull free. Outside, you could walk up to a railing in cement over a squared-off fossilized tar pit far below. I remember not wanting to go close to the edge, afraid I would fall in. My parents tell me I was terrified I would get stuck in the tar.

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[catilinarian.livejournal.com]

I remember my father taking us to the old Princeton University Science Museum; it was a dingy, perpetually empty room with a single, rust-coloured tyrannosaur skeleton reaching up to the ceiling. Everything was in shades of brown and rust, all the wood and books and dusty display cases. And running along one side was a huge window that looked out onto the startling green of the hill beyond the building, and I have the very faint memory of standing by the window and making up stories about previous lives I'd lived, in the time the museum was built, or the artifacts collected, or in made-up times that vaguely correlated with the fantasy stories I loved.

It's funny, I had to take rather a long virtual walk around that room in my mind before I remembered that.

[bironic.livejournal.com]

I have very fond memories of going to the Museum of Natural History (NYC) with my dad when we were kids, and I'm sort of superimposing them onto your story. Hope you don't mind. I didn't imagine different past lives, though. That's cute. I did reconstruct dinosaur skeletons into living creatures in my head, though, and imagined them all running around in context like in those impossibly crowded (http://faculty.buffalostate.edu/beaverjf/internet/lesson9/dinosaurs2.jpeg) illustrations. (I used to have that poster on my wall. It's several feet long; that's a small piece of it.)

What is it with university museums? They all seem to be badly kept and deserted, even when they have specimens to rival those of popular city museums.