Friday, February 13, 2009

day trip!

Last Saturday, M, T, her niece A, and I went to Atlanta for a whirlwind tour of some of the ancient world.  We began our journey at the High Museum for the exhibit of some of the terracotta soldiers from the funerary army of the First Emperor of China.  Excellent exhibit!  You should see this if at all possible!  The exhibit will be at the High Museum through April 19th so I highly recommend that you plan a trip or research to see if this exhibit will be traveling to a museum near you...SO good!

I took this little video outside the High Museum and it is my only photo-type item of the day.  M (wearing the denim overshirt) took most of the photos and has promised (!!!) to email them to me.  I was enchanted with this sculpture, even more so when I got close and could actually see how it was constructed.  It changed shape as you walked across the courtyard but is was only if you cut across the grass and got close that you could see what made it work, v.v. cool I thought.

After the High Museum, we partook of a car trunk picnic (in my super special Sound of Music worthy picnic basket).  T made some AwEsOmE chicken salad and I brought some deli sliced colby jack cheese, Parmesan and garlic pita chips, crackers, Mediterranean herb and garlic goat cheese, rosemary and olive oil Triscuts, and peanut butter cookies.  I briefly considered the whole salmonella thing but we're all still alive and unill.  It was a super better lunch than we could have afforded plus we ate in the parking lot of our next stop, in the shade of a pine tree and feeling the nice breezy, warm, sunshine filled day.  You can't buy that with money (IMHO).

We then went to our next exhibit, King Tut and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs, at the Atlantic Civic Center.  It will be there through May 2009 and should DeFiNiTeLy be on your to-do list if you are anywhere near enough to make the trip!  There were so many beautiful things I can't even describe them all but I will say that there were a few things that I recognized from the photographs in books of Carter's cataloging of the things found in Tut's tomb when he opened it.  VERY VERY VERY powerful and impressive and everything else in the superlative.  I get goose bumps even now when I think about some of the things I saw in that exhibit.  Wooden chests that looked like any other antique I've seen in someone's house, except these were thousands of years old....

Anytime I hear of King Tut now I think of one of my favorite patrons, Mrs. G.  She is a call-in patron because she is blind and it's difficult for her to get out of the house on a whim.  She was 9 years old when Carter opened Tut's tomb and she and her friends read about it every day it was in the newspapers.  They giggled and pretended to be Carter and associates digging in the Valley of the Kings, scaring themselves with thoughts of the musty, creaking, dusty mummies rising from their sarcophagi to stalk the living tomb invaders.  Can you imagine?  She did have to live through nearly every war this nation has been involved with but she has also told me such wonderful stories over the years of our acquaintance.  Her grandmother and mother were from France and spoke little English around her as she was growing up.  She was in Europe for some time when her husband was stationed there and she has a story about having to keep and prepare chickens that I giggle about even now.  The image of her chasing chickens in the muddy French soil with a knife in her hand is priceless.  She's such a delicate, petite, perfectly Southern Lady that it's hard to imagine her ever getting dirty like that.  She also still refers to the American Civil War as the war of northern aggression and we've had our arguments about that is well.  I believe everyone should have a Mrs. G in their life.  Find an elderly person you can talk to about their life.  It's fascinating and so much more helpful than a textbook.  You just have to keep in mind, like Mrs. G's war of northern aggression, that you are getting a piece of history from a very specific perspective and bias.  

I want to have memories like that when I'm 96 too.  I want something other than the Challenger space shuttle, my brother's death, 9/11, and our current economic crisis.  I'm only 31 (soon to be 32), so I do have 65 years to make those memories if I plan on keeping up with Mrs. G :-)

evenin' ya'll!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hey Holley, how bout that rice puddin?