Mommy Likes Museums

Weather keeps changing today, sunny to cloudy to sunny etc. We are going to go to the beach late this afternoon with my friend Alison and her kids, dinner on the Sound. Right now it is lunch time and have finally routed kids into showers and clothes. Now I am waiting for the water to heat up again so mom can shower and we can get out of here. Where I am not exactly sure. My Whaling Museum suggestion met with much derisive laughter and a suggestion from Kate that I hire a babysitter for them so I could go to the museum. They USED to love it there. Will take a quick look at things to do calendar in local paper after I finish this post. I am stuck on museum idea...they'll like it once we get there I figure. There's a small art museum in Huntington with a surrounding park that may work. Okay, I want to go to a museum, but culture is good for them too, isn't it? I am yearning to be surrounded by quiet and beautiful things today. Kids can run all over beach later.

Why I Am Not a Painter
by Frank O'Hara

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.