Loss and Beauty

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Losing someone close to you is never easy.  We of our species are closely interconnected, but family is where we feel the safest and, hopefully, most accepted.  There are many ways to deal with grief, but one of the more unusual is to take a job at the Met.  The Metropolitan Museum of Art is world famous, of course.  And Patrick Bringley, giving up a rat race job at the New Yorker (where he got to meet Stephen King, I might add), to become a guard at the Met, is the kind of thing to write a book about.  He frames it as a way of dealing with the loss of his older brother prematurely to cancer.  All the Beauty in the World gives you insight into a job open to just about anybody, but that has long hours and pay hardly comparable to the costs of living in New York City.  Giving up the rat race to spend your days looking at, and keeping people from physically interacting with, art doesn’t sound like a bad thing.

This memoir delves a little bit into spirituality, but not in any kind of religious way.  Then Bringley starts a family and after ten years decides to take his career in another direction.  I’m familiar with career pivots.  In my case, the choice was made for me and anybody who reads much of my writing (either fiction or non) knows that I’m trying to cope with it still.  In any case, museum work—I’ve applied for many such jobs, on the curator side, over the years—isn’t easy to find unless you’re willing to be a guard.  I know security guards.  It’s not a job that will make you rich, but it does give you access to riches.  Art is something we seldom take time to admire since, for most of us, museums are a weekend activity, and even then, only once in a while.

Museums begin with collectors.  Generally rich ones.  Those who can afford what the rest of us can only dream about.  They’re also altruistic places, for, as well as showing off, they give the rank and file access to what we tend to value even more than money.  The creative work of those we deem geniuses.  Bringley doesn’t just focus on the “Old Masters”—they are in here, but not alone—demonstrating that art can, and should, include the creative work of African-American quilters and woodworkers ivory carvers from Benin.  Museums are places that bring us together instead of separating us (that’s the job of politics, I guess).  And this book is a thoughtful way of dealing with loss.

Nostalgic Shadows

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Nostalgia is a funny thing.  Although it can strike at any age, somehow after the half-century mark it’s particularly easy to get swept into it.  As I written about many, many times, I was drawn into the Marilyn Ross Dark Shadows novels as a tween.  In my mid-to-late forties, when the internet made it possible, I started to collect all the volumes from 1 through 32.  It took several years.  I had to find them via BookFinder.com and our level of income didn’t support buying more than one every few months.  Then in 2022, having difficulty locating the last of the original series, I found a seller on eBay offering up the whole set.  The price for that set was less than the least expensive final volume I could find.  I did what any nostalgic guy would do.

We don’t really buy antiques, but I’d been looking for an office desk (this was before the scam).  I’d been using a craft table for a desk for years and it seemed that I really needed something with a better organizational range.  This led me to stop into a local antique shop.  They ended up not having much furniture, but they did have aisles of nostalgia.  A few weeks later when it was too hot and humid to be outdoors, I revisited the shop.  This time, relieved of the burden of seeking a desk, I was able to browse at leisure.  It’s like going to a museum but not having to pay admission.  I turned a corner and I saw something I’d never seen before.  A collection of Marilyn Ross Dark Shadows books.

It wasn’t a full set, but I had, prior to finishing my own collection, never seen more than one or two together in any single place.  As a child I’d buy them at Goodwill.  As an adult, on BookFinder.  All those years in-between, I always looked for them when visiting used bookstores.  I visit said shops whenever possible.  In decades of looking I’d only found one in the wild once or twice, and always by its lonesome.  This was a completely new experience for me.  It was also quite odd to be seeing them and not having any need to buy them.  I have a full set.  The nostalgia was almost overpowering.  I couldn’t help but think of how even a few years ago I’d been pawing through to see if there were any I hadn’t yet found.  All for reliving a bit of my childhood.