Milling about before a day full of presentations and workshops on technology and museums, John and I told our hosts about the weekend of museum hopping we had already accomplished. See, the presentation was Monday at Wellesley, just about 15 minutes from my brother and sister-in-law’s house. We had decided t make a full weekend of it, driving over Friday and taking in Boston on Saturday and Sunday.
The workshop organizer smiled and said, “So you’re the kind of people who go to museums in your time off, too.”
Yes. Yes we are.
Maybe it’s because our professional lives didn’t begin in museums. Or maybe it’s because we are thieves and plagiarists at heart, always looking for someone who is doing something really cool that we can steal, erm, adapt. But we do go to museums everywhere we travel. And this weekend in Boston was no exception.
On Saturday, we visited the Paul Revere House in Boston’s North End. It was a perfect day. Sunny, but not too hot. The traffic wasn’t unbearable. We parked and walked a couple blocks to the Revere House, stopping momentarily across the street to admire it. It’s much smaller than I would have imagined, although I’m not sure why my imagination would have veered toward something larger. Perhaps it was that, somewhere in my history student past, I remember hearing something about Revere’s children numbering in the double digits.
My 3-year-old daughter cavalierly tried to cross the street alone, and could not understand why we pulled her back.
“What? It’s not a street. It’s just bricks.”
We toured the house in the typical fashion of a family with children who are at varying stages of attentiveness and ability to grasp content. Posey, our 3-year-old, was most impressed by the opportunity to stand completely inside the large (reproduction) fireplace in the dining room. Meanwhile, Bee, who is 6, was more impressed by the objects in the museum: a rocking bassinet in the kitchen, the fake food in the dining room the furniture in the upstairs bedrooms, the fact that there was no bathroom in the house.
For Posey, she was more engaged by the game of make-believe she played in the brick courtyard than by the museum itself. She is 3. Historical perspective isn’t yet her thing.
But for Bee, I wanted to make it more meaningful than just a zip through an old house with no bathroom. We talked about domestic things. Cooking over an open hearth, living without electricity, the logistics of many people sleeping in what amounts to a 2-bedroom/0-bath colonial.
Once we were back in the car, I tried to brooch the subject of Paul Revere’s role in American history, but quickly found that it is difficult to explain Paul Revere without first explaining colonialism, imperialism and revolution. Add in the further complications that my daughters are Chinese immigrants, and therefore not – as I was when I was a very young American history student – looking at history through a lens of white privilege and a Eurocentric sense of manifest destiny. (Not that I was doing that on purpose, mind you.)
So I went with the fairness explanation, something that inspires great passion from sisters who are close in age.
“For a long time, the English people in this part of the world had a leader who didn’t treat them fairly. So they decided that he wasn’t a good leader. They figured they could lead themselves more fairly, so that’s what they did. And the man who lived in this house was one of the ordinary people who helped to start that new country.”
To be honest, she wasn’t all that impressed, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s just a matter of time before she decides to make her own declaration of independence from the tyranny of her little sister. I better hide the tea.
It struck me