Summer Is All About...Museums?

One of my kid's fondest memories, and a standing family joke, is all the museums I dragged them through. Even when they grew up and we got to travel together, no vacation was complete without a visit to the Louvre, the Prado, the De Young, the Met; honestly, I could go on and on. 

Eventually, however, the tables turned. My son Nate and I did Italy. His fave? The Galileo Museum in Florence...and it was his idea! My daughter Angela texted me about a major Hockney retrospective at the De Young Museum in San Francisco, and of course, I couldn't resist. Elitist? Maybe, but you could do a lot worse. At least it's not Nickelback.

One of the most amazing things I got to see on a visit to Getty in Los Angeles some time ago was the stunning painting of Irises, by Vincent Van Gogh. The color, luminosity, and composition almost allowed the long-passed master to reach out through the canvas, across the centuries and grab me by the heart, to demonstrate the magnificence and power of his vision.

So here's a small suggestion: It's summer; take a vacation. You deserve one. And take your kids, they deserve some of your time. Visit a museum together, you might be surprised at your kids' taste, and that they have opinions! It's safe, and after all, it's not politics. 

Museums are a vast storehouse of our humanity. They are a secret passageway, a wormhole, if you will, to a past we can only imagine, with the help of their treasures. One through which we can learn much about ourselves, and perhaps rediscover, and share, our own humanity.

Irises – by Vincent Van Gogh, Saint-Remy, France, 1889.