I’m sitting here in an anciently ugly wingback not quite as nice as Hamish the Corgi’s chair at home and I’m paying for the privilege. Sort of. The price of the chair is probably included in the cost of my vanilla latte and slice of spiced apple cake.

My WideEyedButt is squashing this hard used feathered cushion as a my second choice of morning activities. First choice, oh happy happy first choice, was a bust.

I went to the museum to hang around with Anselm Keifer’s Der Morgenthau Plan. I intended to stand in front of Jackson Pollack’s Convergence. I read a biography or two about him since I was last in front of the image and I wanted to see if it felt different. Giacomo Balla’s dachshund in Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash missed me, I think, and I intended to visit.

None of them were there.  On loan, gone, packed up. Who knows.

Now I find myself, sitting in a cloud of fruit flies and regular flies (a real problem this coffee shop might want to attend to), thinking about school kids on field trips to art museums around the country. Right NOW some 10-year-old’s phone is slack in his grubby kid-hand because Convergence squeezed past his texting, gaming, compulsively digitally-linked consciousness. A cackling 15-year-old girl has stopped giggling, mouth hanging open, because Der Morgenthau Plan’s vastiness and deep thrumming power interrupted her ability to be young and feckless for just a moment. And Bella’s dog, that little dog and his owner walking along a sidewalk one hundred and two years ago, that little dog is charming tiny babies in carriers, changing the snapping synapses in their little brains.

I was sad that I couldn’t be with the paintings this morning. I was ready to sulk here in my smelly coffee shop chair that is infested with public-ness. But I think I can share them. I think my day is better and my world is bigger knowing that other people’s hearts are pounding because of the paintings. Other people are going to lie in bed tonight with the memories of them floating in their dreams.