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| Johannes Josephus Aarts Standing warrior and kneeling woman before 1934 blockprint on Japanese paper Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
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| Johannes Josephus Aarts Oedipus and the Sphinx before 1934 drawing Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
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| Muirhead Bone Gertrude and Stephen, No. 1 1905 drypoint British Museum |
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| Muirhead Bone Joseph Conrad listening to music 1923 drypoint Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge |
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| Constantin Brâncuși The First Step ca. 1912 oil on cardboard Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Francis Cadell Académie before 1937 drawing National Galleries of Scotland |
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| Francis Cadell Académie before 1937 drawing National Galleries of Scotland |
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| Francis Cadell Académie before 1937 drawing National Galleries of Scotland |
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| Francis Cadell Académie before 1937 drawing National Galleries of Scotland |
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| Richard Roland Holst Self-portrait as wood-engraver 1919 drawing Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
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| Glyn Philpot Portrait of Siegfried Sassoon 1917 oil on canvas Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge |
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| Walter Sickert The Trapeze 1920 oil on canvas Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge |
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| Philip Wilson Steer The Blue Dress ca. 1900 oil on canvas National Galleries of Scotland |
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| William Strang Self-portrait 1919 oil on canvas Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge |
Our Spring Trip
Dear Mrs. Masters, Hi from the Fifth-Grade Class
of Park School! We're still here in New York City
at the Taft Hotel,
you could have guessed that from the picture printed
on this stationery – I inked in x's
to show you our rooms,
which are actually on the same floor as
the Terminal Tower Observation Deck
in Cleveland, Ohio,
which we visited on our Fourth-Grade Spring Trip,
but nowhere near so high as some skyscrapers
in New York City:
we've been up to the top of the Empire State
and the Chrysler Buildings, which are really tall!
But there's another
reason for writing besides wanting to say
Hi – we're having a problem Miss Husband thought
you might help us with,
once we get back to school . . . yesterday we went
to the Dinosaur Hall of the Natural
History Museum
for our Class Project – as you know, the Fifth Grade
is constructing this life-size Diplodocus
out of chicken wire
and some stuff Miss Husband calls papier-mâché,
but no diagram we have shows how the tail
balances the head
to keep our big guy upright – we need to see
how the backbone of a real Diplodocus
manages to bear
so much weight: did you know that some Dinosaurs
(like the Brontosaurus) are so huge they have
a whole other brain
at the base of their spine, just to move the tail?
Another thing: each time Arthur Englander
came anywhere near
our Diplodocus, it would collapse because
of not balancing right. This went on until
David Stashower
got so mad at Arthur that he flew at him
and gave his left shoulder a really good bite
so he would keep away . . .
That was when you called the All-School Assembly
to explain about the biting: biting's no good . . .
Even so, Arthur
decided not to come on this year's Spring Trip.
Well, we took the Subway train to the Museum
from the Taft Hotel,
in fact that was our very first excursion,
but the noise, once we were on the platform
was so loud one girl,
Nancy Akers, cried (she always was chicken)
when someone told her that terrible roaring
the Express made
was Tyrannosaurus Rex himself, and she
believed it! – then we went to the Great Hall where
we were surrounded
by Dinosaurs, all the kinds we had studied:
some were not much bigger than a chicken, but
some were humongous!
One was just a skeleton wired together,
so it was easy to see how we could make
our Diplodocus
balance by putting a swivel in its neck.
All the other Dinosaurs were stuffed, I guess,
with motors and lights
inside: when they moved, their heads balanced their tails!
There was even a Pterodactyl flying
back and forth above
our heads, probably on some kind of track.
But even though Miss Husband tried explaining
(for the hundredth time)
how the Dinosaurs had all been extinct for
millions of years, not one person in the class
believed what she said:
the idea of a million years is so stupid,
anyway – a typical grown-up reason . . .
You know the Klein twins,
the biggest brains in the whole Fifth Grade (a lot
bigger, probably, that both brains combined in
that Brontosaurus) –
well, they had a question for Miss Husband: what
if the Dinosaurs' being extinct so long
was just a smoke screen
for their being Somewhere Else, a long ways away?
And Lucy Wensley made an awful pun on
stinky and extinct . . .
Actually, Mrs. Masters, we've already
figured it out, about death: the Dinosaurs
may be extinct, but
they're not dead! It's a different thing, you dig?
When Duncan Chu's Lhasa jumped out the window,
or when Miss Husband's
parents were killed together in a car crash,
we understood that – that was being dead; gone:
no body around.
Isn't that what dying has to mean – not being
here? The Dinosaurs are with us all the time,
anything but dead –
we keep having them! Later, at the "Diner-
Saurus," the Museum restaurant, there was
chicken-breast for lunch
stamped out in the shape of a Triceratops!
Strange how everything has to taste like chicken:
whether it's rabbit
or rattlesnake, it's always "just like chicken" . . .
Anyway, Dinosaurs are alive as long
as we think they are,
not like Duncan's dog. And that's just the problem.
By next week, though, we'll be back in Sandusky,
and while we're putting
the swivel into our Diplodocus's neck,
you could explain to us about Time – about
those millions of years,
and Dinosaur-chicken in the Diner, and
chicken-size Dinosaurs in the Great Hall, and
where they really are.
– Richard Howard, from Trappings (New York: Turtle Point Press, 1999)