In love with Downtown Crossing

This afternoon, my father took me to the Boston Museum of Science. Many of my childhood memories involve the Museum of Science; we would usually wander around the exhibit halls, eat lunch in the sixth-floor cafeteria where the Skyline Room is now, read in the library on the third floor, and see either an IMAX film or a planetarium show. I used to be terrified of the two-story Van de Graaff generator where they put on lightning shows. I never did get around to seeing a laser show, probably because at the age of ten I was very uninterested in Pink Floyd. My favorite places in the museum were always Mathematica, with its optical illusions and projections and push-button Möbius strip; the exhibit about conception and childbirth, that had the statue of a mother with her newborn child; the habitats of New England, in taxidermied diorama; and I was very fond of the gigantic, tail-dragging, eventually outmoded Tyrannosaurus rex statue.* I would climb into the Apollo space capsule at the drop of a hat. I hadn't been there in years.

We skipped the traveling exhibit on Star Wars and went right for the old favorites. No one has updated Mathematica in God knows how many years, at least since the 1970's, and I like it that way. The childbirth exhibit likewise contains a short video of a woman giving natural birth in water, but that's the only change in years. The old T. rex has long since been moved outside (where it was still wearing its holiday Santa hat) and replaced by a leaner, meaner, more accurate predator; this is okay.** There's still an exhibit on the in-progress Big Dig, that I suspect will be there for the rest of the century; and on the second floor there is a new Butterfly Garden, which was lovely. The Common Morpho (Morpho peleides) and the Owl Butterfly (Caligo memnon) were two of my favorites, *** although we also watched a new-metamorphosed Julia (Dryas iulia) pull itself free of its chrysalis, and that was beautiful. (The humidity didn't hurt my head cold, either.) And the Apollo space capsule was there, too: currently inhabitated by small children loudly counting down to lift-off. We didn't have time for the planetarium, but just wandering around the museum was still worth it. I don't ever want to live in a country where parents cannot bring their children to learn about the ways the universe works.

The sun setting in gold haze and firelight over the Charles River, as seen from the first-floor cafeteria at the Museum of Science, was a beautiful sight. I like Boston.

On our way back, we stopped into Pandemonium in Harvard Square, where I had a very pleasant conversation with sokmunky and spent some of my hard-earned money (otherwise known as, I got paid for writing, therefore I recycle it right back into reading: it's like the water cycle, only with books) on Tim Pratt's The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl. I am greatly looking forward to this. I return to New Haven tomorrow; I'll need some fortification.

But on Monday, I get to teach the Odyssey.

*There was also a brief period of infatuation with the replica of a skull from the Neanderthal burial at Shanidar, after I read The Clan of the Cave Bear in seventh grade, but we won't talk about that . . .

**Scientific progress is our friend. (It also goes "boink.") I'd have been upset only if they'd thrown out the old statue.

***Yes, I would still like these butterflies if they didn't have Iliadic names . . .