Museum Of Natural History

On Sunday I met up with my friend Marah at the Museum of Natural History. She gave me a holiday gift - a little microfiber cloth to wipe my glasses. I made a joke of pretending to wipe my contact lenses while they were still in my eyes; but actually it was a very nice gift. It related to an earlier time we'd hung out with Phil and a couple of his friends on his birthday, and watched a movie on my bedroom wall. At one point the picture started to get weird, and we were all thinking this might be the end of the film for us. But Marah got out her microfiber cloth and cleaned the disk, and after that it worked fine. Everyone cheered how she saved the day. So this gift was like a reminder of shared adventure with a happy outcome.

She especially wanted to see the bio-luminescence exhibit, so we headed over there first. I didn't say anything because I didn't want to spoil it for her, but I was actually very disappointed. The exhibit was just a dark room, with small installations sprinkled throughout. Each installation had little light bulbs that would turn on and off at regular intervals; and panels of wood with text explaining some bit of trivia about a bio-luminescent creature. Some of the installations had computer screens that gave more information - but not much more.

All the information I learned in that exhibit would have fit onto a single typewritten page. When I went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium with Kar, they had bio-luminescent creatures swimming live through enormous tanks, and we got to watch them and see what they really looked like, and how they really behaved. And not just a few creatures, but big schools of creatures.

Actually those are not representative videos. The real thing was way more incredible. Apparently no one's posted videos on youtube that really capture what it was like.

So that was disappointing, but we also wandered around the museum for quite awhile after that. It turned out to be a favorite haunt of both of ours when we were kids. Her parents used to let her run off by herself at age five, and get lost in the museum for as long as she wanted. That's pretty much how my parents were too. Those were the days. Before the child harness and other horrors of modern parental psychosis.

So we wandered through the diorama area. That was always my favorite as a child. I could look in those little glassed worlds for hours. I used to wonder how the museum people got everything to be so real, and yet to stay so still. Right down to rushing water. For me, that museum was a place of infinite dreams.

It was a lovely hangout, and it was made even more lovely by having someone there to talk to, who had also had similar experiences as a child. It was like we were both rediscovering a lost fairy land - and thus proving it hadn't been a dream, but was real.

We even went to the downstairs cafeteria, which was almost like another visit to the Monterey Aquarium. The cafeteria itself is this giant tank, and great shoals of people swim madly with the currents, and it's always feeding time. In the seating area, families display their private home-life scenarios proudly for the viewing public. Marah and I got a pretty good table out of the way, but even so it was pretty hilarious to think of this chaos and display, right below the motionless, elegant dioramas of beautiful creatures frozen in time. I think a little piece of that cafeteria may always be with me now.