Just Breathe

I had to do a 7th grade field trip to the Getty with Bess's class.

The last time I went to the Getty I thought I was having a heart attack. I had this terrible pressure on my chest so we left little 1st grade Bess and her field trip bagged lunch and skedaddled to the hospital where I became the proud owner of a partially collapsed lung.

Now it's six years later and doing parental things is not as much fun, because I'm working, and in classrooms with kids, so then doing a field trip with kids on purpose umm why please no

But I get up the mountain, I wear a skirt for god's sake, I look amazing, actually, compared to my insides which are always wearing the same pajama pants and sweatshirt, barefoot.

I'm the first one there, in fact I think I invent the Getty until I see the busload of kids come tromping up the path and man.... middle school is harsh on the unwashed.

So many of them and all the kids look like they're still incubating. The clothes are all disheveled and mostly greys and the whole mass of them look apocalyptic, like they've been living in a bomb shelter and they kind of like it there. There is no soft and cuddly, no sweet, no pert. My daughter, too, with scraggly long hair and bangs I see that I don't know how to cut properly, now that they're out here in public -- these poor kids.

What a terrible time of life. Huge bodied infants. Forming their personalities without John Hughes to tell them how to do it.

I climb many white steps and I feel smarter, I see the ocean. I see Renaissance art, I see Mars trying to kiss a bronze Venus, curled up on his lap. Inside a museum, this trip, I feel relieved, understood and safe. I'm right there in Renoir's woods where a man is helping a lady navigate through painted light and leaves. I stood in front of that painting once with my mom when the kids were small and I had to tug her to leave because the kids were small and rambunctious but now I see it again at the end of the kids and I see what she didn't want to leave. It's just a moment. The painter can't paint everything, he can only capture a moment.

The middleschoolers are crass, and "bored" and flit like deer around and all they want is the water fountain but I make them go through a sculpture room, and walk through the living maze outdoors, and even the toughest kids have a moment of looking at something beautiful and pure and old.

My littlest daughter is comfortable with me so she doesn't notice me, I am like water around a dolphin, but she hands me her jacket and trash like I'm her butler. Even though the inner-est of me wants to scream I AM ALSO SOMEBODY I came on this trip because I wanted to see her world and man, if I were her I'd want someone to carry my jacket and trash too. I'd want someone to care. All those kids, it was like awkward, party of 80.

We make it back to the buses, and I drove separately because damn I do not do well in loud crowded tubes filled with children, and the fleshy teacher is there being alternately accusatory and nice which thank god we only have 3 more months with this bipolar wonder.

In the big white Getty with the nude marble statues and the curvy lines of bodies against the sea and the sky, I miss the people in my life I love the most because up there on that mountain I can feel art and I know I matter.

Bess gets the gross fast food I brought her and I eat a messy hamburger and then we're all funneling down down to the world and the cars and there are lollipops I give out to the  kids on the tram because I'm not against buying friends with candy, and I see a lady's white tshirt heading in with relaxed hair and face that looks fresh from Oregon and her shirt says just breathe

I think about my collapsed lung and the 6 years and the dogs sleeping here now as I write and how Michelangelo must've had a dog around somewhere sleeping on the floor of the Sistine chapel when he was painting what would become his masterpiece and while sweating and covered in paint and I think

life is art.