Meeting the Girl with a Pearl Earring

Last Saturday, my son and I set out on a very early train to New York City (we're an hour away, the perfect distance!) with the nervous hopes of seeing Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring on its second-to-last day in America. I've loved that painting since my college days (I was an art history major), had a framed poster of it in my first apartment, read the book, saw the movie...but somehow, missed the rather big news that it was on loan to the Frick Collection from the Netherlands through January 19th. In a stroke of good timing, my son chose to cover it for his fourth grade art report. As soon as we learned about the Girl's stateside visit, we enlisted the help of my art-loving, New Yorker uncle, who arranged to stand in line for us an hour before the museum opened. Even then, there was still no guarantee we'd get in, as the lines had been circling around the block for weeks and the exhibit was in its final days.

For over two hours (three for my uncle), we waited in a line that barely inched forward, getting pelted by big, wet snowflakes, which froze our toes and chased away less determined people from the line. But in the end, we made it! We were face-to-face with a celebrity of historical proportions, and guess what? It was worth every shivering minute.

Actually, I think we enjoyed the exhibit even more because of the wretched wait. It was especially rewarding to be admitted to a toasty-warm museum on a frigid day and get up-close-and-personal with the likes of Rembrandt, The Goldfinch by Carel Fabritius that inspired Donna Tartt's best-selling novel of the same name, and most of all, the Girl we came to see.

The most surprising thing about the Girl with a Pearl Earring is that it's quite small, in the same way that the Mona Lisa is surprisingly small in real life. The picture above was taken in the atrium outside the exhibit, right before I was told to put away the camera-phone. The Girl is the ultra-miniscule speck in the frame on the far wall, within the arch. (Yeah...I can't see it either--I just know it's there because I was there.) Also surprising: We learned that pearls of that size were undocumented at the time, so the subject's earring was probably made of glass, or was a figment of the artist's imagination.

Afterward, we took brisk walks around the (finally dry) city, then cabbed downtown to our favorite bookstore in the entire world, Strand Books. If you visit New York and love books, that is theeeee place to go! (Within the link above, there's a great video tour of the store that really captures its essence.)

There are three vast floors of books, with a huge (but somehow cozy) children's section on the second floor, and the top floor (pictured below) is reserved for rare books. A very large portion of the books at the Strand are pre-owned, which is the greenest way to go when it comes to acquiring books.

Post-Strand, we had a quick bite to eat at Pret a Manger, my favorite "fast food" stop. It's also super-green. They serve organic food, donate each day's unsold food to homeless charities, and have an impressive recycling system at each restaurant. The first time I ate at a Pret restaurant was several years ago, during a layover at London's Heathrow Airport, when I wondered, "Why don't we have this type of healthy fast food chain in America?" I'm so pleased that Pret made its way across the pond!

Finally, we were homeward bound. I'd forgotten my reading glasses at home in the haze of the morning rush, and I'm totally "Mrs. Magoo" without them. Being without glasses drastically limited my peeks at my iPhone and iPad throughout the day, which turned out to be a good thing, as I'm slightly addicted to the dopamine buzz from receiving new messages. It also thwarted my plan to read on the train home, so I spent the trip just watching the world whiz by my window. (Sometimes, I need these "enforced breaks" from technology--don't you?)

It was a perfect Saturday, when everything came together just as we'd hoped. A day spent really and truly concentrating on my son, having the most interesting chats together, and enjoying the city's sights. The best of them, of course, was the Girl with a Pearl Earring.

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Your turn: Have you ever seen a painting up-close that you've long admired? How did it compare to your expectations? Please share in the Comments section below. If you are reading this post via email subscription or mobile device, click on the title or go to www.JoyfullyGreen.com from a computer to see the comments and leave one of your own. (Don't forget to click the box for subscribing to comments so you can follow the conversation.)

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