Day on the town

Today we had one of those magic spring days that we used to get in New England. Clear crisp cold and magnificent. Still spring break for the kids, so I bundled us all together for the trip into town for an appointment I had there. Naomi, seeing that we were late for leaving the house, made us jog to the train station—which was the right move, as we arrived, breathless, to board the train just pulling in to the station.

Then the sparkling train ride in past water so blue that it almost hurts the eyes to look at it (videos of that forthcoming). Michael met us at the station to take the kids out to lunch while I went to my meeting. Afterwards, I ate lunch with a friend at the café on top of the library, while the kids played and read downstairs in the kids’ section and Michael had a work meeting six tables away. Then the kids I and were off to Te Papa.

I’ve written about Te Papa before—about the Egyptian exhibit which moved me so much in its tri-cultural nature—Egyptian, Western-European, and Māori. Today I was blown away by two different exhibits.

First, we went to the Immigrants section. We were there to see R’s partner (also R) who had a painting on display and a short 3 minute video about him next to the painting. We watched the video—about his journey from Scotland to New Zealand, and what it felt like for him to be a foreigner and how it had changed his art. I was moved by pictures of his family in Scotland, and by hearing the love for New Zealand so clear and strong in his lilting brogue.

Wandering out of that exhibit—just focused on the Scottish folks who have come to NZ—I was in the general immigrant exhibit. There are pictures of people arriving by ship and snippets of letters home. And, because Te Papa is run by some seriously good museum designers, there are questions all over the walls to pull in visitors and make them think. These were questions like: “What would it be like to leave all of your family thousands of miles away and come to an unknown land?” or “What would it take to make you want to leave everything you know and start again?” or the interactive exhibit which asked: “Would you be allowed in under the immigration reforms?” I was reminded of all the other immigration exhibits I’d seen—in Boston, in DC. In the past, I've always been moved by these exhibits, because my people are immigrants. My grandmother used to tell stories, in her Irish brogue, about life in a far away land of green hills dotted with sheep. This time, though, I was moved in an entirely different way. All of a sudden, this exhibit is talking about ME, not my people, not my family, but ME. When there is a quote on the wall about how someone came to New Zealand because it was safe and lovely and welcoming, suddenly I can peer at the fine print and see if that was me saying those things. And the questions on the walls are not hypotheticals but blog-fodder. This whole blog seeks to answer the question “What would it be like to leave all of your family thousands of miles away and come to an unknown land?” Read the last 150 entries. And the next 150. Right there in the exhibit I had an identity crisis: was I the American progeny of Irish immigrants or was I the American immigrant who had brought one of the family lines to New Zealand. Am I the granddaughter of immigrants or the mother of immigrants? This seems like a question you should be able to answer.

Then there was another exhibit to check out—this one called The Poiseners (to read about it, click here ) . The impressive thing about this exhibit wasn’t that it messed with my identity (I don’t think of myself as a poisoner nor as a poisoned) but that I could go and visit an exhibit of this quality for free in this lovely place. It was the best designed museum exhibit I’ve ever seen—a series of rooms that represented the work rooms of characters who were suspects in the poisoning death of an ecologist. We were given worksheets and pencils and were told to follow the clues in the rooms to find the murderer. And everyone did it—small children just learning write, slumping teenagers I’d have thought were too cool to play, sweet grandmother types counting the alphabet backwards on their fingers and peering into glass cases with snakes or berries or a platypus. It was “New Zealand crowded” which meant there were people in each room—after all, it is school holidays. But where the Sargent exhibit in Boston or the Vermeer exhibit in DC had rooms so thick with people you had to stand on line to glimpse a painting, here it was rarely the case that we had to look at the same thing anyone else was looking at, and sometimes we’d find ourselves in rooms alone. And, also unlike the DC or Boston museums, here Aidan called us into a hallway to show us out the huge picture window, which looked down at ducklings paddling in the water below, and looked across the harbour at snow capped mountains far in the distance. Astonishing.

Then we met up with Michael again and all headed up the cable car to the top of the Botanic Gardens, where we meandered in the evening light past trees dripping with flowers and patchwork quilt stretches of blooming tulips. Magnificent! We were last there as a family on our first day in this new country, 10 full moons ago. Fresh from the airplane, guided by K and T who seemed to be so at home in this beautiful and foreign place, last December I was bleary and overwhelmed. What had we done, I kept wondering, then. Could I ever feel at home here? Today we were wandering familiar territory. We could pick out our office buildings from the overlook. I could show the family where I had run the seminar two weeks ago. We had lunch with friends we didn’t know when we arrived; over the course of the day the kids bumped into school mates to a chorus of “Hi Naomi! Hi Aidan!” We had great coffee and simple but lovely lunch and dinner at a couple of Wellington’s billions of cafes, many of which we've sampled. I may not know whether I’m an immigrant or not, but I seem to be sure that at least for now, that museum and garden, those cafes and buildings are all familiar and that it might, one day, feel like home.