We have two chairs which were given to us by, if I remember correctly, the cousin of an aunt. This cousin lived near us when we lived in the city the first time, had just had twins, and wanted to clear out her apartment. She wanted the chairs to stay in the family, and she considered us family, so she gave us the chairs, with the request that we not sell them or put them out for pickup, but keep them in the family and if we needed to, give them back to her one day.

One of the chairs had a broken arm, which we repaired. One is in the dining room. Where is the other one? Somewhere.

One thing that was funny about this woman, whose relation to me is, as I said, attenuated, but enough that I have her chairs, is that she called me by my mother-in-law’s name, and I answered to it. I was walking up Broadway when I heard someone call, Claire! and I turned, because Claire is both close to my name and the name of someone who is important to me. I turned when she called, Claire! and saw her and said, Hi!, and then I found that I couldn’t say, You got my attention by calling me Claire but that’s really not my name. So I have her chairs and I have been very unkind, because I never corrected her.

Today was the last day of Henry’s school year. He was so tired. He was a company man, home at 6. He just wanted to put his feet up and have the dog bring him his slippers. Mommy, a chocolate milk.

I gave him his chocolate milk and got him in the car. We had a date at Dia: Beacon (the colon: more offensive than misused quotation marks?) to meet his cousins, in from out of town. Please don’t start me on the terrible directions the museum gives out. Are the directions art? Is sending someone up Route 9 for forty miles a work of art? Because if it is, you’re a fucking mother fucker. I didn’t take the bait. I took 87 way the fuck out of my way while the kids fought in the back seat and the aquarium played its unrelenting medley of grief. There was a moment where the children told me the batteries had run out but this was heart-breakingly inaccurate.

You can go to the museum’s directions if you want and you’ll see I had a choice of directions, the sane ones or the insane ones, and they listed the insane directions first and I didn’t see the other ones so I am complicit in the bad directions. I’m still pissed.

Anyway, we arrived. Eventually. This is almost always true. The children greeted their cousins and the four of them ran around inside the enormous old factory, totally ruining the Zen vibe for everyone else. One man’s minimalist restored factory is another’s playground for running and making noise. Ironic, isn’t it? Well, at least they didn’t break anything. Or kill themselves on Robert Smithson’s “Map of Broken Glass.”

I’m going to have to continue this on Monday. I will say before I go that it’s not that you can’t look at art with children around. You can look at art as children do, so with no understanding of history but with a robust appreciation of things that look weird or scary.

We went home and watched Scooby Doo. I’ll talk about the art later.